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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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