Image by Sean MacEntee via Flickr

Over the last five years that Abraham Harrison has been pitching bloggers on behalf of clients, we have learned a thing or two about how best to reach bloggers, how to engage them, how to get them to carry our client's message to their readership. Whether we're doing an outreach to the bloggers of mainstream media and celebrity blogs or to someone who has just set up a blog for the first time, it all begins with the message model.

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Protect IP Act & Stop Online Piracy Act seek to cripple Internet freedom & social media

Guest post by Markos Moulitsas
Daily Kos

Big Pharma and the recording and movie industries are on the verge of passing a bill that could very well destroy the social web, including Daily Kos.

This is no hyperbole. Watch the video above. It is literally an existentialist threat for Daily Kos and any other site with user-generated content, from Facebook, to Reddit, to tumblr, Sound Cloud or YouTube.

This is the holy grail of the entertainment industry — to destroy the internet, and thus, destroy the biggest danger to their business.

While the entertainment industry already has outsized tools to fight piracy, they don't want to deal with the hassle of having to send takedown notices to individual infringing sites. It's hard work, going after YouTubes of dancing babies and stuff! And, of course, they don't have jurisdiction over many foreign-based sites. So, if they can't stomp out all piracy, plan B is to destroy the internet.

Democratic Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy is inexplicably leading the charge in the Senate with the Protect IP Act. Republican Texas Rep. Lamar Smith is leading the companion bill in the House with the Stop Online Piracy Act. This bill would've been rushed through with no debate through both chambers had it not been for the singular efforts of Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, a true hero of grassroots media and the social web.

Wyden has put a hold on the bill in the Senate, and has promised a full filibuster. Currently, there appear to be 60 votes to overcome that filibuster, but the delaying tactics would tie up the Senate for a full week. And if it doesn't pass this year, supporters have to start from scratch all over again next year — this time under the full glare of a spotlight. (Socialmedia.biz mentioned this issue in our coverage of the Web 2.0 Summit.)

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In order to keep on the cutting edge of social media I tend to play a lot. Experimenting keeps Abraham Harrison au courant. Several months ago I received a Twitter DM from Shel Holtz asking if I would help him promote FIR for him via my social networks. The link popped off to a companycalled GaggleAMP.

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Last week, I wrote Max SEO with 8 simple Google+ steps  before Google opened up G+ Brand Pages, so first go read what I wrote in the previous post (because all of the advice still applies). In this post, we'll work on setting up your brand page right away in the right way. If you follow these steps, you'll be as well-placed as possible.

First, did you notice that there's a new button on your Google+ profile? Go ahead and click "Create a Google+ page" and we'll get started.

Your first option is to create a page. Be careful here, because it isn't simple to change the sort of page you have.

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My colleague Mike Moran over at Biznology is offering a complimentary 30-minute webinar, Organizational Social Media for Financial Services: How to Start from Within, on Nov. 15 from 11:00 AM - 11:30 AM EST. Registration is free and it promises to help the financial services industry make social work for their financial services business:

• How ready is your organization for social media?
• Do your employees know the rules of the road and how to comply with them?
• How do you turn the vast amount of data from social media into insights?
• How do you get the social expertise on board?
• How do you constantly measure and evaluate your efforts?

There promises to be a lot of great stuff in there. Folks in heavily regulated industries such as finance and pharmaceuticals are afraid of their own social media shadow, and Mike's the man to show them the way.

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Let me boil my last post, Here's why it make sense to use Google Plus, down to practical pieces. Part of what makes a technology premature is that you have to be careful how you use it, because it isn't mature enough to just work no matter what you do with it. To help you carefully handle Google+ for maximum advantage, I've assembled eight steps that help you get the best searh visibility from your Google+ posts. These tips ares simple, but some are easy to overlook. I hacked this awful-looking graphic as an example:

Here's a list of things that you need to consider before you invest your time and energy in Google+:

1. Make sure all your posts are Public. You can add more circles in order to spur interest among your friends, but be sure you explicitly tell Google, through your willingness to share publicly, that they can index your content in their public search engine. Check this every time because sometimes Public isn't always selected, depending on the situation. Here's my Google+ public profile.
 
2. Use a clean URL when you add your content to Google+. Google+ hasn't been translating URL shorteners well, so use a link from the source. This will not only allow Google to better populate the content as you see above, including the Title, Blog Name, Description, and an Image from the post, but it will also allow that content to be cross-referenced to any Google +1 "likes" from others within Google+ and the rest of the Googlephere. Site URLs are translated the way they are on Facebook. You need to paste the URL into the "Share what's new..." text box.
 
3. Prefixing names with a plus sign links that name to the person's profile on Google+. You can include your friends and people you're connected to on G+ in a similar way you do in Facebook, but Google+ has a gimmick that you may know or not. In the graphic above, you'll see a light gray-blue rectangular box around the names Arsh S and Jenna Levy -- I did that by adding a plus symbol (+) before each name while I am writing the article. G+ then populates a pull-down, offering pre-populated names of people I am connected to. I just need to select and go. Sometimes the profile's privacy setting prohibits the link reference to persist after posting. Linking to people is a good way to engage, inform, and initiate conversation.

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Google+ launched prematurely — so take advantage

There is unnecessary unrest that has been buffeting the launch of Google’s newest online social network, Google Plus, and the reason for that is simple: Google was forced to launch G+ because Twitter blocked Google’s real-time and direct access to Twitter updates. This is now becoming old news but it explains everything. This is why Google+ didn’t have a brand page similar to Facebook Pages, built-in upon launch, resulting in either a transparent and compliant real name membership or deletion, with the exception of Ford Motor Companyand a few others that are the only brands that are in a testing phase, the sort of testing that happens in limited and private beta.

What has been happening even before the real names scandal is the scandal that any and all Google Plus profiles that were not simply real users with real names were deleted en masse. Most of the very early adopters who did not read the explicit terms of service (ToS) took the opportunity to not only create a G+ account for themselves but also set up Google Plus profiles for their brands and companies as well.

Within a day of being allowed in via viral invite or connections, there were thousands of connected, fleshed-out and promoted ad hoc corporate and nonprofit brand pages popping up everywhere.

This is a pretty common behavior in any new system as the tech-savvy flood in and test boundaries and limitations even if they have read the ToS closely. The truly unique and impressive (or tyrannical) response was in Google enforcement, which was immediate, insidious, terrifying and often sloppy when it came to brands. Brands were deleted that were, in fact, true names run by true people, often celebrities.

I remember adding Vin Diesel to my circles. He was removed, though I never discovered if real Vin or brand Vin or fake Vin fell under Google’s sword. Another was Captain Kirk (William Shatner), who was deleted but who really was who he said he was.

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Anthony Edwards at BlogWorld Expo, 2009 (photo by J.D. Lasica)

Guide to events & conferences for the coming month

BlogWorld Expo, Social CRM and Social Media Prom are just some of the conferences on tap for this month. Here's our roundup of social media, tech and marketing conferences and events for the month of November. We can't vouch for whether the Innovation Summit is still happening in Sonoma County later this month — they didn't bother to answer our query.

For the full year, see our full Calendar of 2011 social media, tech and marketing conferences. And Socialbrite has our calendar of nonprofit and social change events for the month.

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

Conference	Date	Place
November
Social Media World Forum - North America	Nov. 1-2	New York
Two days of interactive & engaging conference featuring leading key figure keynotes, brand case studies, topical Q&A and debates, exhibition hall, workshops and networking.
Social CRM	Nov 3	New York
Are you connecting with customers on multiple platforms? Are you mapping this across your organisation? Do you have a joined-up strategy for managing customer engagement? Featuring an amazing case study from American Airlines, plus Dr Natalie Petouhoff, Tatyana Kanzavelli, Richard Hughes and Adam Metz, #SCRMNYC will provide a 1-day master-class in Social CRM. Don't miss it! BUY YOUR TICKET HERE: http://www.oursocialtimes.com/socialcrmnewyork/ Get 10% off with this code: SMBIZ10
BlogWorld & New Media Expo	Nov. 3-5	Los Angeles
BlogWorld moves from Las Vegas to LA, where experts from every field of blogging and new media will be on hand to share their knowledge, techniques and advice. Industry gurus will share their experiences and network with attendees in seminars and moderated panels.
Social Media Prom	Nov. 6-10	San Francisco
Social Media Prom is "a formal dance for all of you who didn't get a chance to make it out of your house, the backseat of the car, or ..."
The Market Research Event	Nov. 7-9	Orlando, Fla.
TMRE remains focused on the business value of market research and this year brings you more than 140 sessions and more than 175 speakers. Join the global community of market research leaders as we tackle the most critical issues in market research today and rally as an industry to Lead in A New Direction.
Sentiment Analysis Symposium	Nov. 9	San Francisco
This gathering bridges technology and business in one of the most exciting applications to emerge in recent years: software that discovers business value in opinions and attitudes in social media, news and enterprise feedback. The event comes to the West Coast for the first time, building on the April 2010 & 2011 symposiums in New York.
Innovation Summit	Nov. 10-12	Sonoma County, Calif.
Put on by Partners for Growth, this conference is designed not just for CEOs, CMOs, venture capitalists, developers or designers but also reaches out to anyone interested in technology. The gathering will bring in speakers from the nation and Europe to discuss how to be innovative and build upon the entrepreneurial spirit.