Kimberly Hubbard popped me a note months ago with a series of questions for me and I got around to them. Take a gander at In the Know With a PR Pro – Meet Chris Abraham:
Name: Chris Abraham
Title: President
Company: Abraham Harrison
Summary: Abraham Harrison does the leg work for companies hoping to connect with their customers and strengthen their social media presence. We help companies engage with bloggers, on Twitter and Facebook — in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and other languages — in their native cultures.
It’s Business Time
How did you get to be where you are today?
I studied American Literature in college, though I grew up the son of a professional photographer and exile of the NY Advertising world— an illustrator and, later, an ad man. I was brought up with books, art, and photography and was making and selling images as early as 13. When I graduated in 1993, the economy was tepid and I ended up looking for photographer jobs since I was a member of ASMP (The American Association of Media Photographers). My first job was with Picture Network International, one of the first online stock photo services, offering images via dial-up. When they realized that I had mad computer skills (from being a geeky computer hobbyist as a kid) they sent me to the image server room and I got my first Unix account, became a system admin, and earned my geek wings. This resulted in a decade of being a geek, systems administrator, and programmer — which I was good at but wasn’t passionate about.In 2002 I left it all and took a three month sail from Acapulco to Los Angeles and thought about what I wanted to be when I grew up. I had been dialing into message boards and forums since 1982 and loved my second life online — really was as close to being a native denizen of the proto and current Internet as anyone I knew. When I returned from the sailing trip, I discovered New Media Strategies (NMS). NMS was one of the very first social media marketing firms and I halved my salary to get into there and I was home. Every day I engaged with big Hollywood and NYC brands, products, and services, learning how to take all of the mad skills I had earned as a geek, a programmer, and bonafide virtual community member and how to sort out the best ways to engage and influence influencers online. It was stupendous! A few years later, I was poached by Edelman Public Affairs and brought on to work in their Online Advocacy team working on major PR and Public Affairs clients.
I hated what NMS paid and I hated working for a big agency so I leaped out on my own and started Abraham PR, which grew and grew. Soon, I begged my best friend and experienced NYC fortune 50 media executive, Mark Harrison, retired at the time, to come aboard as CEO and we changed our name and incorporated as Abraham Harrison, LLC, in March of 2007.
What is one thing that you know now that you wish you had known when you first started in PR?
I wish I had known how closed-kimono the PR world was. Mark and I assume that we can talk about all of our processes — our tactics, our best practices, and our strategies — and it won’t matter too much because there is such a big difference between knowing generally how to do what we do and actually having a trained and experienced team of over 40 online analysts, researchers, project managers, operatives, native in many different languages and cultures, as well as over three years of operations under their belts. I mean, I can’t believe how black box so many PR and ad agencies are with their methods, their ROI, and their efficacy.This sort of blogger outreach and social media engagement requires one heck of a lot of transparency and I fancy that most people online are a little leery of marketing, PR, and sales people anyway, so being perceived as less than trustworthy doesn’t help anyone. And when it comes to clients, we’re interested in return business and long-term relationships, so the less black-box we are — the more the client knows about what we’re doing on his behalf, the better. Especially when clients try to do it themselves and realize that blogger outreach and social media marketing can sort of feel like juggling while navigating a unicycle through a mine field.
What tech and PR blogs/publications can you not live without?
I read the AdAge blogs, but my big secret weapon is the Power150 lists of marketing, PR, SEO, and advertising blogs. The gang at AdAge, which supports the list, offers an XML-based expert file that allows you to easily take the list of over 1,000 blogs on the list at any one time and import that OPML file into my newsreader. I personally use Google Reader, and spend quite a lot of time using my RSS feeds inspire me when it comes to blogging or sorting out new innovations, new sales channels, and methods to increase and improve the sort of accountability and proof of ROI clients want more and more. Actually, my team and I steal shamelessly from all the good stuff that the top 1000 marketing, PR, advertising, and SEO bloggers share with us for free. (Check out http://adage.com/power150/ http://adage.com/power150/opml )What’s the first thing you do when you get the office in the morning? Or, how do you start your day off right?
No office. None of us have an office. We’re 100% virtual, and spread across 12 countries. No commute unless you want to pedal over to the coffee shop. So, what I do when I get up in the morning? The first thing I do in the AM is make coffee and check my email. We’re a global 24/7 shop and sometimes I am in NY or DC and sometimes I am in Berlin, but I check email, then I check servers (we have several dedicated servers) and then I check Twitter (@abrahamharrison and @chrisabraham) and Facebook (facebook.com/abrahamharrison and facebook.com/chrisabraham). Then I check my Google Apps calendar for the day’s calls. Then I try to read the papers (FT, NYTs, WSJ) and then peruse Google Reader and the folks I am following on Twitter.
Just for FunHome state: Hawaii
Favorite thing(s) to do when not at the office:
(What office?) I am trying desperately trying to learn German so I study that and attend classes on Rosetta Stone and at the Goethe-Institut. I love to ride my single speed Surly Steamroller. I try to get down to the river as often as possible to scull but generally, when I don’t, try to go on a walk, a run, a jog, or haul all of my paper magazines to the gym, read them on the elliptical machine, and then leave them there to make them Not My Problem. I love Netflix and movies and have been trying to watch as many German-language films as possible. I blog for fun. And love to read.What’s the last book you read?
The last book I have read was The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest back in Berlin. I picked up the first book in the airport in Stockholm and the second two at the airport in London. I gloated quite a lot that I got to read Hornet’s Nest way before everyone else in the US.
