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Start rockin’ your red white and blue because this Friday marks the beginning of the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games in Vancouver, BC. The city will welcome all of the worthy competitors and their diehard fans who are lucky enough to see these world-class athletes live. For those of us who cannot make it to Vancouver and witness the excitement first-hand, TeamUSA.org is giving fans a chance to take part in all the action.
Register at TeamUSA.org and you will:
- Receive exclusive updates during the Winter Games
- Get the inside scoop, event by event
- Hear directly from our Olympic athletes as they chase their dream
- Be able to download photo and video highlights, right to your desktop
Team USA has been training hard. We must recognize their admirable accomplishments and cheer our hearts out to help the great USA take home some sweet gold. Register now to be ready for Olympic fever!
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=10404f85-41fa-4b92-89bf-c23759d8df24 "Register at TeamUSA.org for exclusive Winter Games info")
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When I heard about the devastating earthquake in Haiti in January 12th, I reached out to our friends over at International Medical Corps to offer a hand.
They agreed so I started planning a very quick blogger public affairs informational outreach to let bloggers around the world know about IMC’s good works and their mission to get doctors in-country to physically put medicine to use on the injured, hungry, and dehydrated residents of Port au Prince and Haiti in general.
Well, I got onto our Abraham Harrison weekly management team meeting on January 18 and initiated a campaign to craft a one email outreach to over 9,700 English-speaking bloggers with a very short pitch and a simple plea: please post or tweet about IMC’s mission, here’s a widget if you like, we would love your readers to help. Here’s the email we used on our January 20th outreach and here’s the email I received:
From: Ellie Brown <ellie@imc-haiti.org>
Subject: Haiti still needs helpDear Chris
International Medical Corps is a global, humanitarian, nonprofit organization, founded by volunteer doctors and nurses and dedicated to saving lives and relieving suffering through relief and development programs. Our emergency response team is in Haiti responding in force and I would like to ask for your help to get the word out to the readers of Because the Medium is the Message. There are still thousands of patients seeking treatment of which approximately 80% are in need of surgery and are running out of time – especially with the tremendous aftershocks still devastating this country. The team is treating crush injuries, trauma, substantial wound care, shock and other critical cases with the few available supplies – And they’re in it for the long haul. I would love your help spreading the word by blogging or tweeting about IMC’s rescue efforts. We’ve put up a blogger friendly widget here on our site:
http://www.imcworldwide.org/haiti
With the widget it’s really easy to let your readers know that donating $10 to help the people of Haiti is as simple as sending a text message of the word “haiti” to 85944. If you have any questions just let me know and I will do my best to help you out. If you are able to post the widget or tweet, I would appreciate it if you could send me the link.
Thanks so much,
Ellie
–
Ellie Brown
International Medical Corps
ellie@imc-haiti.org
If you’ll notice, we were very explicit with what we asked, what we needed. We also reached out with Ellie Brown’s real name — as we do in all of our campaigns, no false name for us, ever – but as representing International Medical Corps.
We act as consultants for our clients so we feel comfortable reaching out as our clients on these client-blessed campaigns. Also, the sole link we included usually goes to our own bespoke Social Media News Release — see USOC, FAF, OLX, MotionBox, BrandsClub, etc — but in the rush around doing this pro bono rush outreach, we were happy that IMC already had a landing page / microsite already developed for the campaign, http://www.imcworldwide.org/haiti, which is perfectly useful and meets all of our outreach campaign needs.
While we generally do a three wave campaign with two follow-ups on the initial ask, in this case time was of the essence, so we just made one single request outreach.
Also, we generally don’t do outreaches as aggressive as the 9,700+ strong outreach we did in this case for IMC — generally closer to 2,000-per-outreach — but I was willing to risk a little because IMC’s mission in Haiti is such a good, meaningful, generally-understood, and timely event and I really wanted the largest and broadest impact possible.
So far in this unique campaign we have been able to log 171 earned media mentions that could be directly connected to our outreach, not secondary or tertiary “echoes.”
Next week, I will post all of the blogs and tweets — 171 — that we have received between the initial outreach on January 20th, when we sent out the request, the ask, and January 26th, when the campaign organically concluded.
Our hearts and prayers go out to the residents of Haiti and to all of those noble folks who are doing good works down there and will continue working on rebuilding Haiti and helping Haitians well past the media moves on to something else. We love International Medical Corps because they always invest in communities long term and that’s what Haiti needs right now: commitment.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=351b1427-d97a-45d5-8151-b06c383a5c83 "Giving a Hand to Haiti via International Medical Corps")
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Abraham Harrison
Last week Rodrigo Martucci addressed some questions and issue that people who read Marketing Conversation or know a little about The Abraham Harrison Way always ask, some of which was explored in How Blogger Outreach Works at Abraham Harrison. Rodrigo is one of the most innovative, creative, and passionate staffers at my agency, pretty much our go-to guy for Brazil — culture, Portuguese, social media, etc — so I asked him to expand upon my post and to address some of the comments people had in the form of Following up on Blogger Outreaches and Staying Relevant:
After Chris’ post on “How Blogger Outreach Works at Abraham Harrison“, some great comments were made and questions were raised on how the follow up process works and how to reach the highest influence from such a huge database of bloggers.
One of the most important pieces of a successful blogger outreach is staying relevant. There is huge database of bloggers today and although it might be tempting, you must limit your outreaches to your target audience. It has been a long-standing industry practice to email as many people as possible and hope that some of them will bite. This is why A&H has been so successful when it comes to blogger outreaches. Bloggers are so surprised to find a person on the other side of the conversation that they become more personal, more attentive and more responsive. This is the basic idea behind a blogger outreach follow up. A lot of bloggers don’t respond to the first email thinking that the information is not relevant to them, it is spam or it is just not worth asking questions to a robot. We find that a lot of times we receive a lot more responses from the 2nd or 3rd follow ups than we did on the 1st.
The basic guidelines for a good follow up are:
- Let them know you are following up. It’s not the first time you are reaching them, so don’t change the message completely, hoping they will think it’s something new, because it will backfire.
- Talk like a person. As it was mentioned before, this was a targeted outreach. Don’t speak in totally general terms and don’t make it clear that you used a name replacement tool, if you did. (don’t you hate it when car insurance companies call you with that recorded message and they just replace your name in a different tone)
- Focus on a short message that will tell them what you want and what they can gain from it. (special gifts or privileges to bloggers go a long way)
- Have the information ready. A lot of bloggers will just copy the information that you send to them, so make sure it is ready to go into a post.
- Do a blog search. There are many tools for this and what you might find out is that they already posted, but haven’t told you yet. If this is the case, it is still good to send a thank you email.
In conclusion, please stay relevant. I’ve said before that this is what separates us from the rest of the PR agencies out there. Once your information is relevant, you have bargaining power to follow up and let them know that this information is exactly what they need.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=4dba0fd0-b0a0-4f43-a96f-9a01363e621c "Blogger Outreaches and Staying Relevant")
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Last week, our intern, Ellie Brown, asked me if it would be OK to blog about her experience as an American University-credited intern at Abraham Harrison. Of course! Of course! Well, here it is, enjoy, My super fantastic internship:
Hi everyone! My name is Ellie and I am here to share with you the trials and tribulations of my internship this semester with Abraham Harrison LLC. I am a grad student getting my master’s in Public Communication and hope to someday be a a snarky public relations executive at a big company where I can boss interns around all day…just like Chris Abraham, president of Abraham Harrison.Actually, that couldn’t be further from the truth. My internship so far has been anything but getting bossed around. Abraham Harrison is a public relations company that engages in social media management, online grassroots & new media marketing, business intelligence, search engine services and online reputation clean-up. Really, really cool stuff.
My responsibilities so far have been reading up on all the latest social media news and info, writing about it for the company blog Marketing Conversation, helping out with blogger outreach for International Medical Corps to raise money for Haiti, and whatever else comes up. Oh and did I mention this was all done from the comfort of my own home (or the uncomfort of the AU library)? That’s right, AH doesn’t have a physical office. Everything we work on is done online and staff live all over the world. It’s pretty great.
My introduction has been brief, but I hope you’ll check back every now and again to see what I’m up to. More about blogger outreach next time…
Ellie Brown 9:35 am on February 1, 2010
Wow, that was great. Uh oh, I surely hope we don’t screw everything up for all of the NYC, SF, DC, Atlanta, Chicago, and Boston agencies and firms that spend most of their time abusing their interns while making them go in Starbucks runs and all of that filing and photocopying and dry cleaning pick up and so forth.
Funny thing is, we had an Intern once, Lasse, who insisted we find him a proper job in a proper office, requiring him to wear proper shirts and slacks and shoes and — gasp — ties and jackets! To each his own, I guess.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=b47c8989-6b6b-45df-b6ec-c07015ff29e5 "Ellie Brown’s super fantastic internship")
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- Image by samlustgarten via Flickr
At digital PR and social media marketing agency, Abraham Harrison, we currently have around 80,000 bloggers in our lists, but those lists are not used like traditional mailing lists, because of the constant new growth and attrition in the blogosphere.
With each new client, and each new outreach, we identify with the client what the demographic is they want to reach, then we ID the bloggers who are leading and influencing that demographic. We call these groups of bloggers that we identify as the group influencers a “universe”.
The universes are built by rechecking the existing lists (adding newcomers and culling deadwood), and by building up brand new lists (since each client has a different set of demographics they want to reach.
We then reach out to these bloggers in a 4-6 week campaign which includes an initial semi-personalized outreach email, followed up by 2-4 follow-up emails. The emails are terse and the majority of the messaging is “outsourced” to a social media news release (SMNR – a one-page simple HTML microsite) that is a “steal me” sheet for the bloggers to make their blogging about our client super easy. Here is an example of an SMNR: http://freshairholiday.org/
Each one of these outreach cycles generally leads to 100-300 social media mentions in blogs and on twitter (depending on how intriguing the client’s message and offering is), invariably reaching millions and in many of our campaign’s cases, 10MM+ people.
We integrate twitter campaigns (followership-building, messaging, and community engagement), Facebook, Youtube promotion, and A-list outreach as well. The most basic of our campaigns start at $5000 a month, and the more complex campaigns top $20K per month.
Via Abraham Harrison and Marketing Conversation
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=1aece2f5-378b-4a83-8326-948423d3c741 "How Blogger Outreach Works at Abraham Harrison")
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John Cass from PR Communications and I had a contentious conversation about social media enagagement transparency, technique, strategy, and rules of engagement. When Toby Bloomberg of Diva Marketing Blog and he planned on writing a blog post on this issue John approached me to ask me if I had any input. Instead of being contentious again, I thought I would ask one of my staff to address the question and then post about it, unedited and unmolested by me — and here’s what Ellie Brown came back with, Is Your Agency Showing?:
Toby Bloomberg of Diva Marketing Blog and John Cass from PR Communications recently sent out a request for readers to give their thoughts on content writing and social media engagement on behalf of clients and whether or not this brings into question the issue of transparency.
Recently, there has been a tremendous upswing of companies and organizations adopting some sort of social media in their marketing portfolio. And with this growth, more and more of these companies are hiring agencies to implement social media initiatives. As Toby says: “Social Media is a beast that needs to be fed.” And sometimes the only way this can be done is to hire someone to do it.
The potential problem with this model is that the public could feel they are being misled by these companies and the agencies they hire to represent them. The beauty of social media is the ability to listen, learn, and build honest relationships; but if you don’t know who you are interacting with, the relationship could be sacrificed.
However, I don’t think it matters who is doing the responding, as long as they are responding. The goal of social media is to facilitate discussion and generate attention through tweets and posts by real people. The company name on that person’s business card doesn’t matter. The agency is an extension of the client, and as long as the agency is well-informed, genuinely interested, authentic and responsive – everything should be good.
I recently started doing some blogger outreach for Abraham Harrison and I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance and impact of transparency in the work I’ve been doing. Here are some things I’ve learned so far, both from training and from actually doing it:
- Be responsive, friendly, authentic and apologetic (if necessary).
- Respond with personality, not like a robot.
- If asked, be honest about who you are. If necessary, respond with something like this: “I work for a PR company called Abraham Harrison and we are helping Company X spread the word about such and such cause.”
- Know how to answer questions, respond to comments but also when to ask your contact at Company X to step in and provide information. Don’t make things up if you don’t know; better to just ask and find out the answer.
I’ve noticed that people really don’t care that they have been contacted by a PR company on behalf of so and so company. Most are just impressed that there is an actual person behind the message.
I think that if there are people out there who can outsource their online dating successfully a la Tim Ferriss (I mean talk about transparency issues), then outsourcing your social media implementation shouldn’t be a problem.
I’m looking foward to see what Toby and John compile about this topic from all the experts in the field.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=32fbefa9-534d-4f9e-b9e0-c4d895ad85ca "On Transparency in Social Media Engagement")
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- Image by razzumitos via Flickr
Abraham Harrison, my agency, has become truly global in the last year, adding the capacity to do social media marketing and blogger PR in Spanish, Polish, Russian, German, French, Japanese, English, and Brazilian Portuguese — and a lot of Portuguese-speaking campaigns, supporting blogger outreach and engagement as well as Facebook and Twitter publicity and community engagement. It kind of rocks. Rodrigo Martucci is our secret weapon and I asked him to please start blogging once in a while in his native Brazilian Portuguese and here’s his maiden voyage in Portuguese-language blogging on Marketing Conversation:
Não é mais segredo que o número de usuários brasileiros no Facebook ultrapassou dois milhões o crescimento está sendo incrível; no Twitter, o Brasil já é um dos países com mais influência e membros, e centenas de milhares de blog posts são publicados todos os dias no Brasil. O segredo está em conseguir enxergar o valor dessas imensas oportunidades.
Houve um tempo quando publicidade online era somente através de banners e anúncios em sites de busca como Google e Yahoo. Mas porque? Simplesmente porque esses meios eram os únicos que ofereciam maneiras de medir o sucesso do investimento enquanto evitando o risco financeiramente. No começo era tudo uma maravilha, mas o que acontece quando a empresa para de investir nesse meio de publicidade? A resposta é: NADA! O link da empresa desaparece das buscas e o tráfico direcionado ao site cai drasticamente. Resumindo, essas soluções são completamente de natureza curto prazo e permitem que a competição obtenha o tráfico online da sua empresa com um simples clique para aumentar a lance.
Por isso são grandes as vantagens do investimento na atmosfera social online. Quando um “blogueiro” publica algo sobre a sua empresa, o conteúdo nunca mais vai desaparecer. O conteúdo vai ser encontrado por sites de busca, os leitores vão ler e comentar e a informação será para sempre pública. O mesmo acontece no Facebook, Twitter e outras redes sociais. O fato desses meios serem tão influenciais só afirma a importância da participação das empresas nas conversas, que já estão acontecendo! Se o nome da sua empresa é assunto nessa “atmosfera social”, a política mais sensata é fazer parte da conversa e controlar a opinião do público.
Além disso, hoje é possível calcular estatísticas ligadas ao custo e retorno como retorno sobre investimento e ligar visitas ao site diretamente às redes sociais e blogs. Mais importante ainda, enquanto o público online amadurece, se transforma informado e imune a banners e formas de marketing tradicionais. O público então valoriza sua própria opinião e quer ser ouvido e compartilhar idéias.
Resumindo, assim como 66% das empresas do mundo pretendem fazer em 2010 (techcrunch.com), sua empresa também deve investir nessa forma de marketing direcionado à conversação para poder competir no século 21. A Abraham&Harrison oferece todos esses serviços, estatísticas e resultados garantidos; por preços bem menores do que o custo de investir em meios tradicionais de publicidade.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=a8d52a97-33ad-46fb-9642-4483947d616a "Blogging and Blogger Outreach in Brazilian Portuguese")
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Phillip Rhoades wrote up a post about truth in publicity, advertising, and marketing, Drop Kick The BS And Earn Trust:
A lot of corporations have been sending a great deal of BS out to the consumers for a very long time, but companies are starting to see that the consumers are too savvy for tall tales. Twitter, Facebook, and other social media tools allow consumers to talk to each other about products, services, and companies at an amazing pace. The BS that used to protect a company, now only serves as fodder against it.
My suggestion? Drop kick the BS and move straight to the truth. Today’s consumer appreciates it when a company is willing to quickly and honestly own up to mistakes. They don’t expect a corporation to be perfect (after all these people have gone through the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s), but what they do demand is honesty and ownership of faults.
Don’t be afraid to say sorry. Don’t be afraid to admit a mistake. In the long run it’ll make your brand stronger, because the consumers will feel that you have earned rather than abused their trust.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=5406806c-de16-4bb7-9095-3b0125623c32 "Drop Kick The BS And Earn Trust")
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