I had my television début on Washington Business Report this morning on WJLA ABC7. I was invited on by Rebecca Cooper because she stumbled upon the Abraham Harrison website and liked our humor and our business.  So, here’s the video of the segment for you to check out:

I’ve run a social media marketing agency since Autumn 2006 so Abraham Harrison is almost five years old. In that time, we’ve learned quite a lot. One of my biggest learnings is that you can’t always get a direct bead on your demographic target–and that’s OK. We’ve worked for a broad spectrum in these five years, from health care and pharma to huge radio astronomy projects; from global non-profits to very specific public affairs campaigns. Social media marketing and blogger outreach and activation can be effective for everything, though it isn’t always clear how. B2B seems to be the least confident that social can help them but I believe we have really sorted it out: What I’ve learned is that if you cannot target your dream customer directly, you can target everyone around him.

I call this “fire for effect,” which is a term taken from artillery for when you don’t quite know where your target is or your target is well-guarded or sheltered. So, what you do instead is you fire downrange, doing your best to either step your shells closer and closer to the true target or to just use the shock and awe of incoming high explosive shrapnel shells going off everywhere else, distracting and engaging powerfully but indirectly. (In artillery, you generally try to have someone down range, a forward observer, who can help you drop your mortars closer and closer, called adjusting your indirect fire, which I will discuss further along.)

Let me bring this analogy back to social media marketing. In two instances, I have seen indirect social media marketing work wonders. 80% of what we at Abraham Harrison do is long-tail blogger outreach. Instead of “sniping” at just the top-25 most influential bloggers in any one vertical, we dig deep and often come up with between 2,000-10,000 relevant blogs. Most client projects make it easy for their general appeal; however, in a couple notable cases, firing for effect was the only thing we could really do: targeting health care providers for a client that sells health care devices and targeting astronomers for a global radio telescope project.

What we quickly realized is that not only were the doctors and scientists that my clients most desired generally not blogging, they were also very busy and quite invulnerable to the sort of blogger PR pitches we were wont to do, but they were also unpredictable and often volatile.

Doctors were almost impossible to access directly and scientists tended to be impolite whenever they received a plea via email from someone they didn’t know — typical A-lister behavior.

What we needed to do was to brainstorm and expand our campaigns to include everyone around the doctors. Since the campaign was a public affairs campaign on hospital acquired infection-prevention, we brainstormed on who else is in the space–targeting the “ground” immediately around the docs, expanding as far out as we had budget and time.

Who did we come up with? Well, nurses, orderlies, caregivers, parents of elderly parents, partners of the elderly, people with immunosuppressive diseases, parents of sickly children, pregnant women, nursing students, medical students, public policy bloggers–the list was thousands of blogs and bloggers long. All the earth around the OR, an impenetrable fortress, was razed and we super-saturated the blogosphere, the twittersphere, and the Facebookosphere with discussion, mentions, messaging, excerpting, and commentary about the very real issue of healthcare associated infections in today’s hospitals and clinics: ventilator-associated pneumonia, surgical site infections, cross contamination, etc.

The same thing with the scientists who are associated with the radio telescope campaign. The scientists were there, they were just snippy, so instead of risking too much negative feedback, we instead isolated them and instead reached out to everyone around them: science nerds, space geeks, techies, amateur astronomers, sky watchers, backyard astronomers, and stargazers.

When it comes to blogger outreach and engagement, the goal is never to convert the blogger into a customer, I must remind you, but is always to message through the blogger onto his or her blog as a post, tweet, retweet, or wall post. If the blogger is a gatekeeper, a blockade, to the blog and the blog’s readers (and to the spiders and bots, busily indexing links and content for Google, Bing, and Yahoo!), then you must abandon them and move on to the more accessible publications–generally the hobbyists, the amateurs, and the aspirants of the social media and blogosphere.

Amateur hobbyist bloggers are generally hungrier, more available, more grateful, and don’t have the hundreds of “date offers” that journalists, professionals, or A-listers generally have–they’re interested in making a name and are generally pretty amazed when a brand or an agency is sensitive and generous around to notice a blog that’s not solidly in the A-list and are generally really appreciative and open to building an authentic relationship.

Why do all of this? Why expend all this energy and munitions on indirect fire? The obvious answer is to smoke them out. Since we’re often able to start a wildfire of blog posts, tweets, likes, retweets, and Facebook shares, there’s really nowhere for these well-fortified A-listers, scientists, professionals, and surgeons to hide.

And since all of the messaging, all the wildfire, is no longer coming from up range, from our battery, then it is no longer associated with us or our clients. Now, the wildfire is owned by the blogosphere instead of the client or my agency.

This means that the public affairs messaging, the content from our social media news releases, and the emailing back and forth between my crack team of online analysts and the hundreds of bloggers who take up the flag of our outreach, become detached from the final end-product: the rash of intense conversation, posting, tweeting, and retweeting that has all of a sudden lit up the social mediasphere like day actually comes from an impressive number of bloggers and readers from the space and not, at the end of the day, directly from us–so, it is much more likely that these unassailable influencers will end up, at the end of the day, be influenced anyway, without ever being pitched directly by us.

We have seen this happen time and time again, so much so that we have cliches for these things: priming the pump, setting the stage, tenderizing the steak, fertilizing the field–and, of course, carpet bombing (I like that last one the best, but my management team wants me to stop using military analogies, so please forgive me for all the above).

Because nobody believes me that this all works, I like to collect “thank you blogger” posts (from the clients who allow) wherein we “thank” the people who blog and tweet for us, through earned media (we don’t pay anyone–all of this isn’t payola-based) and the numbers speak for themselves: Thank You Habitat for Humanity World Habitat Day Bloggers, Thank You All Who Supported International Medical Corps!, Thank You Fresh Air Fund Bloggers, Thank You Snuggle Crème Bloggers, Thank You To All Of The Olympic Bloggers, Thank you Alzheimer’s Bloggers, Thank You Habitat For Humanity World Habitat Day 2010 Bloggers, Thank You HAI Watch Bloggers, Thank You MLK Memorial Bloggers, Thank You Motionbox Bloggers, Thank You To All US Winter Olympic Bloggers–so, the proof is in the pudding.

At the end of the day, the results outlive the campaign on organic search. When hundreds of blogs and tweets are published online–public, archived, and indexed–most of which link to your client’s social media news release, Web site, issue page, or landing page–hundreds of posts from a diversity of blogs and sources, almost always focused on a very impassioned three-week span. While I don’t condone link-farming or any black hat or even grey hat tactics, earned media mentions–where “earned media” means that you make the offer–the pitch–to the blogger and the blogger decides if and when he or she will post and how he or she will post.

Some bloggers post the our pitch email directly to their blog and that’s cool. A majority mention that they received a pitch from us and our client as well as excerpting and blockquoting a sizable amount of our very own copy from our social media news release. A minority actually spend the time to go in and write up a brand new piece, researched and contextualized, and we love those, too. We’re realistic: we’re reaching out to someone, asking for their help, not paying them anything at all except attention, and then expect them to do us a solid and actually post about our clients for free? Well, we’re always darned grateful for just about any mention–even, believe it or not, the spiny ones. It’s all good.

And, at the end of the day, as they say, any publicity is good publicity as long as they link our client’s name, product, services, and keywords as close to right as possible.

Via Mike Moran’s Biznology Blog via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz

Yesterday, Mike Moran and I were invited to be on The Voice of Russia to discuss Google+with their two charming hosts. We really geeked-out and didn’t dumb it down at all.

Google’s new online social network called Google Plus first hit the web. A lot of people thought this was Facebook or Twitter. But as tech insiders continue to dig deeper into its features and capabilities, they are finding it does more than just refine popular networking tools found on other sites. It also streamlines the social media experience.

Joining us on the line to talk about Google Plus are Mike Moran, Chief Strategist at the Converseon social media consultant agency and Chris Abraham, President and Co-Founder of the Abraham-Harrison, a digital PR and social media marketing company.

Via Marketing Conversation and The Voice of Russia

Yes, I know that it is circa September 2007, but though our clients have gone 20x from back then, the truth of it is that “blogger outreach to influencer identification, brand protection and social media consulting” is still out core, four years later.  Check out Abraham Harrison Manages A Successful Virtual Business Using Google Apps Premier Edition:

Abraham Harrison specializes in everything from blogger outreach to influencer identification, brand protection and social media consulting for clients like Friendster, Deutsche Telekom and T. Rowe Price. When it comes to running its own business, Abraham Harrison remains true to its Internet-centric roots. Besides the two founders, the team consists of 14 contractors spread across the United States, Europe, India and Africa, who often change location for extended periods. Abraham Harrison deployed Google Apps Premier Edition that has raised staff productivity to a new level. Using Google Apps communication and collaboration tools, the firm’s team of relationship marketing experts can work together from around the world to produce results for clients.

And, the entire TechRepublic article is all because Google featured Abraham Harrison as an exemplar for distributed, virtual business using Google Apps, in a white paper.

My CEO and co-founder of Abraham Harrison, LLC, is a hoot and a holler and recently announced to the team and to the world that I, Chris Abraham, President and COO, am now merely Chris Abraham, President — here’s his announcement and congrats to Sara!

While our President and COO Chris Abraham has been off wandering the country, there has been a palace coup back at AH HQ in Washington, DC. Chris now bears only the title of “President.”

Chris has passed on the mantel, and now our beloved Sara Wilson is our Chief Operating Officer.

Let rejoicing be heard throughout the lands! The despotic reign of Chris-the-Frightening is ended and we will now be led in Operations by the wisdom and brilliance of Sara-Who-is-Smarter-than-Chris-and-Mark-Combined (that is her other title, besides “COO”).

Thank you, Sara, for accepting this role, and we’re very pleased to continue working under your leadership!

I made this decision.  Sara has been our Director of Operations for years and now that I am almost always on sales, promotional, and on-site consulting trips, offering the title and the position to Sara Wilson.  How did I know?  Well, because she has been scheduling business trips and on-site client meetings and airline tickets and Amtrak trips and closing business and making sales and also running all the trains on time — autonomously, without seeking my counsel every time.  Just on her own. Rockstar.  Talk about incentive, passion, and natural talent.

If that isn’t the work of a Chief Operating Officer, I don’t know what is.  If you have ever met Sara, you’ll be abundantly clear as to why both Mark and I consider Sara to be a superior being and that we are not remotely worthy of her.

Good luck Sara and thank you for taking the position!

The sales team of my company, Abraham Harrison, has sent me on a vision quest across America via automobile. Part selling, part sharing, and mostly turning social media only and online social network only friends into IRL. It has been hard to plan everything out this far but Sara Wilson’s 9-year-old son has sorted it all out for me and my trusty German sedan. Here’s the concise list:

• Atlanta, GA – Arrive 1/4 and Depart 1/9
• Birmingham, AL – Arrive 1/9 and Depart 1/11
• Lafayette, LA – Arrive 1/11 and Depart 1/12
• Houston, TX —  Arrive 1/12 and Depart 1/18
• Dallas/Ft. Worth, TX – Arrive 1/18 and Depart 1/22
• El Paso, TX – Arrive 1/22 or 1/23 and Depart 1/25
• Phoenix, AZ – Arrive 1/25 and Depart 1/27
• San Diego, CA – Arrive 1/27 and Depart 1/29
• Los Angeles, CA – Arrive 1/29 and Depart 2/6

(In between LA and Seattle – TBD)

• Seattle, WA – Arrive 2/25 and depart March 4th

INTERMISSION: Flight home to DC for about 1 week, then back to Seattle

• 2nd time in Seattle, WA, and Vancouver, BC

Then Return Trip – TBD, expected arrival back in DC is late April/early May. Please comment here in the comments or email me at chris.abraham@chrisabraham.com if you’re in any of the above cities in any of the above dates and I’ll be sure to make some time for coffee, breakfast, lunch, dinner, drinks! Many thanks to Priya Malla, Sara Wilson, Ann Place, and Sara’s son for hooking me up with rooms, routes, meetings, and little fridges for my rooms and for Mark Harrison for forcing me to go.

Thanks to Phillip Rhoades and the blogging team at Marketing Conversation, we have broken into the AdAge Power 150 proper, at this moment number 131! Where I come from, that’s a Christmas miracle! Thank you to Phillip Rhoades, Geri Casas, Anthony Marques and especially Robin Pangilinan, our new prodigious and prolific Wunderkind! This is sort of a big deal to me and to us at Abraham Harrison, (via Marketing Conversation)

While the Economist is calling what I do “my spiel,”

Here’s their spiel: the mainstream media—the traditional gatekeepers of news and the bane of the PR man’s life—are becoming less important. So is the worth of the advertising slots they sell, and therefore so are the sort of paid-for, hard-sell campaigns that the ad men and marketers deal in. Meanwhile social networking, with its cacophony of bloggers, Facebookers and tweeters, is becoming more influential. It is also confusing and hard to control. The public is becoming deafened and confused by a barrage of contradictory messages. Bernays’s maxim about the public needing trusted “influencers” to tell them what to buy and think is therefore becoming truer than ever.

Let me explain: my agency is not banking on a shift of power from mainstream media to bloggers and social media.  I have little or no interest in any particular blogger’s or tweeter’s personal influence, though my strategies are not typical. I am interested in all of their voices equally.  There is power in numbers.  I am egalitarian and am not interested in becoming a King-maker online.

In fact, we embrace the chaos!  Nobody in my agency feels like we’re the boss of anybody online. We also understand how scared mainstream media like The Economist are — they don’t really like the shift of control, can’t handle the fact that you really should not — cannot — herd cats.  We have just mastered the art of making a can-opener sound loud and compelling enough to attract kitties from all over the neighborhood!

Abraham Harrison is banking on the disruption of the mainstream online, though not only online. Both worlds bleed together through the mediasphere.  We’re banking on the dilution of the power once held by a handful of journalists, reporters, and anchormen.  At least I see that there is a new and fecund seedbed that is so very fertile and so powerful that even mainstream media tends to follow the lead.

Mainstream media is picking stars from YouTube and they’re picking more and more stories right out of the trending topics on Twitter.  We’re not banking that the social-mediasphere or the blogosphere will usurp the New York Times or the Economist, we’re banking — and experiencing — the WikiLeaks effect.

What is the WikiLeaks effect?  Well, we’re watching the irrational exuberance of newspaper publishers in one giant feeding frenzy over Julian Assange‘s leaked content on his terms.  Influencing hundreds or thousands or millions of bloggers, tweeters, and Facebookers en masse to school around a message, an issue, product, an event, or a passion can spur political and news decisions.

Actually, it can change the direction of the conversation. It can change the world. Seriously, this is not hyperbole.

I know this is yesterday’s news but it still hasn’t changed: each one of you — of us — has more access to tools that can expedite, influence, effect, and harness change than ever before. Justin Beiber and Charice Pempengco are the highest-profile example of going from nowhere to King and Queen of pop, but there are an infinity of examples. Perez Hilton, for example.  And no, that land grab is not over.  New titles are awarded every day. Blogging is not dead, it is hard. People giving up because something is too hard is not the same as something dying.  All those tweeters and bloggers who have ceased blogging and tweeting are not reading blogs and tweets.  They’re committed lurkers.  They’re readership.  Yes, even you PR and Ad men, you too.

In mainstream media’s desire to keep up and keep relevant, they have become indiscriminate and frenzied.  There is a lot of opportunity there.  Now is the most empowering time to actively participate in the conversation that is happening now online, happening every day on message boards, forums, Twitter, Facebook, hi5, Orkut, Second Life, irc, Ecommerce sites, blogs, email lists, and whatnot.

My agency and I are not depending on the voice of one blogger or tweeter, we’re depending on their choir of voices in concert.  That’s what The Economist missed.  The new media and social media war is not the war of the flanking Redcoats (MSM), it is the Revolutionary war: the mainstream media Redcoats against the social media Rebels.  Not conventional war.

Mind you, Abraham Harrison offers earned media services, meaning that our messaging and outreaches aim to inspire folks online to seriously consider what we’re proposing with the goal of writing, tweeting, blogging, podcasting, videoblogging, sharing and/or Facebooking it.

Not one front directly opposed to another across trenches.

The mainstream media, including The Economist, is physically unable to see what is before them.  They’re unable to even recognize what is going on even now.  They’re not even completely clear that they have been reporting on news, content, events, and political action that has been influenced, steered, instigated, catalyzed, and propagated by communications shops the world over, from crisis shops to public affairs, from promotional agencies to social media marketing teams; from PACs to lobbyists — every day.

Personally, I’ve been herding cats by opening cans of cat food and planting catnip online professionally since 2003. Sorry, Economist, too little too late.

Rise of the image men PR Man has conquered the world. He still isn’t satisfied

AS THEY prepared to face their second big strike in four years, America’s coal-mining bosses knew they had to do something about the newspapers. It was 1906—a time of rising resentment against robber-baron capitalism and the heyday of muckraking “yellow journalism”. During the previous strike the trade unions had fostered good relations with newspapermen and won themselves a sympathetic press. To help put their side of the story, the mining bosses turned to a former journalist, Ivy Lee.

It was already fairly common for big companies and public figures to employ publicists and press agents to represent them and rebut criticism. But these men did not conduct extended campaigns to influence public opinion. And many prominent folk engaged with the mass media as little as possible. As Stuart Ewen notes in “PR! A Social History of Spin”, the standard businessman’s attitude towards the public was one of “hardened arrogance”. Lee was to pioneer new methods—and, in the process, create a new industry.

Lee observed that the rise of national newspaper chains and syndicated journalism in America since the 1880s, combined with the extension of the franchise, had profoundly changed society. Now, for the first time, there was something that could accurately be called “public opinion”, a shared consciousness and conversation across the country—and it was to be feared. Lee noted how the emerging mass media were acting as the conduit for the anti-capitalist message of Progressivism, the liberalising reform movement that peaked in America in the early 20th century. He realised not only that it was essential for businesses to counter this message, but that the same conduit could be used to spread pro-business sentiment.

His idea, blindingly obvious now but a novelty then, was to send newsdesks a stream of statements putting the mining bosses’ case and rebutting allegations against them. These, as well as the statements he put out the same year on behalf of a railway following a train crash, are now sometimes described (with a bit of spin) as the first press releases. The immediate result was perhaps the earliest recorded whinges from journalists about being bombarded with tendentious bumf.

Lee’s response to such complaints was a bombastic “Declaration of Principles”. He snorted that “This is not an advertising agency…our plan is frankly, and openly, on behalf of business concerns and public institutions, to supply the press and public of the United States prompt and accurate information concerning subjects which it is of value and interest to the public to know about.” No doubt the hacks scoffed at his pomposity. Lee’s tactics nonetheless worked: the mining bosses’ side of the story was given a fairer hearing henceforth. The public-relations consultant had been born.

Of course, spin and image-making have been around for as long as history has been recorded. The earliest historians were often the PR men for the winners of battles and dynastic squabbles. In 18th-century London, the political spin-doctor was already at work, in the form of Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, who conducted a ruthless publicity campaign on behalf of the Whig leader, Charles James Fox, in between posing for Gainsborough and Reynolds.

But only since the early 20th century, and Lee’s campaigns for the coal and rail bosses, has there been a recognisable PR industry dedicated to shaping the representation of clients in the media. That industry has since grown to enormous (indeed, perhaps excessive) size and global reach. Ever since Lee’s first spats with cynical hacks, public-relations officers have been locked in an antagonistic, symbiotic relationship with journalists, with mutual contempt tempered by mutual dependency. They have also fought for influence within big corporations against their great rivals in the marketing and advertising departments. Yet, after a century of spinning, PR Man remains uncertain of his proper role. Is he a master manipulator? Is he the devil’s advocate (as long as Satan pays his fees)? Or is he a benign bridge-builder between the corporate world and the public?

The dark arts
Despite representing big businesses, Lee at first bought in to two of Progressivism’s main ideas: that the excesses of capitalism must be curbed; and that ordinary people were rational and responded best to facts and figures. He presented an “honest broker” vision of public relations that, to this day, is the one that most of the industry’s leaders reflexively proffer. As Lee put it, PR is a “two-way street”. He put forward sincere, factually based explanations on behalf of his clients, listened attentively to the public’s response, then conveyed it back to his masters, helping them to understand better how to meet people’s expectations.

This principled version of PR did not long withstand pressure from clients to take a more forceful stance. In 1914 perhaps the most unpopular capitalist barons of all, the Rockefellers, were facing a storm of popular anger over a massacre of striking miners and their families by the paid thugs of a Rockefeller mining company in Ludlow, Colorado. Lee was hired on the strength of his performance in the previous decade’s mining strike. But instead of delivering honest truths, as he had promised in his “declaration”, he spread egregious lies about the strikers and the cause of their deaths. One of his press releases accused Mother Jones, an elderly union organiser, of being a prostitute and brothel-keeper.

Testifying to a congressional inquiry afterwards, Lee was startlingly honest about his dishonesty. “What is a fact?” he asked. “The effort to state an absolute fact is simply an attempt to give you my interpretation of the facts.” In other words, it was perfectly OK to bamboozle the public with plausible-sounding factoids. Verisimilitude mattered more than veracity. His testimony earned Ivy Lee the nickname “Poison Ivy”. He had committed what is still seen as a grave error for a PR man: becoming the story.

Freudian analysis
Even when Lee was claiming to be an honest broker there were some who doubted that the public responded best to rational argument. The rise of radicalism in the years preceding the Russian revolution worried elites everywhere. And there was growing interest in what the emerging field of psychology had to say about the irrationality of the human mind, and in particular that of the masses. Among the curious was Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud and the other main contender for the title of PR’s founding father. He turned others’ theoretical musings on ordinary people’s openness to images and emotional appeals into a series of handbooks explaining how to manipulate the public mind in pursuit of corporate or political goals.

Like Lee, Bernays had started out as a journalist, editing medical magazines. But he discovered the power of persuasion when, in 1913, he promoted a play about the spread of syphilis in a family, breaking a taboo against mentioning sexual diseases. The success of his efforts persuaded him to become a publicist, representing some of the great performers of the day, from Vaslav Nijinsky to Enrico Caruso.

Bernays’s greatest opportunity came with the outbreak of the first world war. President Woodrow Wilson realised the government needed to bring on board the many doubters who saw it as a capitalists’ war that their country should shun. Bernays and other leading PR men were recruited to a new Committee on Public Information (CPI), a vast propaganda operation. They were to put into practice one of Bernays’s main findings from the studies of mass psychology by Uncle Sigmund and others: that the public’s first impulse is usually to follow a trusted leader rather than consider the facts for itself.

In small towns across the country the CPI recruited bank managers and other local authority-figures as “four-minute men”. They gave brief, supposedly impromptu, speeches in cinemas and other public places. Many made the bogus claims that antiwar sentiment was being fomented by German agents, and that America risked being overrun by Prussians.

So successful was the CPI in shaping public opinion that it encouraged the early PR men, Bernays especially, to puff themselves up to new heights of grandeur. No longer would they be mere lackeys of the robber barons; they were now the Great Manipulators, shapers of public opinion for the public’s own good. Bernays went so far as to proclaim that, since the public was so irrational, “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.” The alternative to manipulation, he argued, was chaos. Illustrating the extent of his, and the PR business’s, exuberance at this time, one of Bernays’s manuals boasted: “When Napoleon said, ‘Circumstance? I make circumstance,’ he expressed very nearly the spirit of the public relations counsel’s work.”

Edward Bernays maintained that the alternative to manipulation was chaos
Unlike Napoleon the PR industry has never known retreat. It has spent the past century advancing, from its origins in America and Britain, across the globe and into all areas of corporate and public life. In “A Century of Spin”, another history of the industry, David Miller and William Dinan note how PR conquered China in the 1980s, in the wake of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms. In 1984 the first state firm set up an internal PR department, followed a year later by the country’s first PR agency, a joint venture between Burson-Marsteller (a big American firm) and the Xinhua news agency. These days PR enjoys as heady a growth rate as any other industry in China.

All sorts of outfits have discovered the power of persuasion. Charities, trade unions, protest groups and other anti-corporate organisations create stunts and “facts” as powerful, and sometimes as dubious, as those staged by Bernays’s minions. A masterful recent example is a Greenpeace video in which an office worker opens a KitKat and finds an orangutan’s finger inside—the intention being to press Nestlé, the chocolate bar’s maker, to stop buying palm oil from places where the ape’s native forests are being cut down. Such anti-corporate PR often goes curiously unnoticed by historians of the industry, but it is at least as manipulative as what companies get up to.

Indeed, a revolving door has opened between the PR operations of companies and their critics. In 1997 Greenpeace, seeking a new communications chief, turned to Jonathan Wootliff, formerly of two of America’s biggest providers of corporate PR advice, Hill & Knowlton and Fleishman-Hillard. And where is Mr Wootliff nowadays? Back on the corporate side. He works for Reputation Partners, advising big firms (from BP to an Indonesian pulp firm) how to build “productive relationships” with NGOs and activists. The public-relations men recognise that PR is PR, whichever side it is conducted for.

Washes whiter than white
Since the 1960s, when both sides in the brutal secessionist war in Nigeria’s Biafra region hired foreign PR men to try to get the world on their side, the agencies have found a growing sideline in what their critics call “reputation laundering”. Hardly any regime has been too nasty to be represented, from Argentina’s bloody military regime to Suharto’s brutal kleptocracy in Indonesia. Justifying their image-making on behalf of such unappealing clients, PR men have developed another version of what their industry is for—an alternative to the well-established “honest broker” and “great manipulator” models—in which they portray themselves as defence lawyers in the court of public opinion. By analogy with the criminal courts, where even murderers are entitled to a defence, they argue that they are simply serving justice.

For example, in August, when the Guardian wrote about his company’s image-making for the government of Sri Lanka and others with poor human-rights records, Tim Bell, one of British PR’s leading figures (and a former image-maker to Margaret Thatcher) responded: “I am not an international ethics body. We do communications work. If people want to communicate their argument we take the view that they are allowed to do so.” Lord Bell nonetheless says he would not force his staff to work for a client they found unpalatable. Some were recently excused from working on a brief to represent the Norwegian government in calling for a resumption of whaling, for example.

Although it has been debating the issue for decades, the PR industry is no closer to agreeing where the limits of such advocacy should lie, says Anne Gregory, professor of public relations at Leeds Metropolitan University in England. Its professional bodies have codes of practice that ban outright lying on clients’ behalf. But there are so many agencies fighting for business that such rules are often honoured in the breach. The industry “goes round and round” the same ethical issues “like wheels spinning in the mud”, she laments.

What people in the industry are certain about, and have been since the days of Lee and Bernays, is their burning desire to be more than just press-release peddlers and excuse-makers. PR folk want to be at the strategic heart of organisations, helping to make big decisions. Some cite firms such as IBM and Diageo (a drinks giant) where PR men have won seats at the executive top table. Such optimists—the industry is full of them, of course—now spy a rare opportunity to steal a march on the Mad Men of advertising and the flipchart-wielders of marketing. In the chaotic online world of social networking, they argue, their talents are much more relevant than their rivals’.

Here’s their spiel: the mainstream media—the traditional gatekeepers of news and the bane of the PR man’s life—are becoming less important. So is the worth of the advertising slots they sell, and therefore so are the sort of paid-for, hard-sell campaigns that the ad men and marketers deal in. Meanwhile social networking, with its cacophony of bloggers, Facebookers and tweeters, is becoming more influential. It is also confusing and hard to control. The public is becoming deafened and confused by a barrage of contradictory messages. Bernays’s maxim about the public needing trusted “influencers” to tell them what to buy and think is therefore becoming truer than ever.

Anyone with a laptop can quickly become a company’s most trenchant critic
It is true that anyone with a laptop or smartphone can go online and quickly become a company’s most trenchant and visible critic. Look at the attention (and the near-200,000 followers) grabbed by BPGlobalPR, a Twitter feed set up to attack BP over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. In this world, PR firms expect that their clients will need more help in mopping up publicity slicks and, ideally, in preventing image blowouts before they occur. Ray Kotcher, the boss of Ketchum, one of America’s biggest agencies, predicts there will be “more demand for reputation-defending than ever”. As a result, PR is bound to become more vital, he reckons.

It is not difficult to stick pins in the PR men’s inflated hopes of being the lords of online chaos. For a start, ad men can also distribute their hard-sell branding campaigns on social networks. Nike shows its television ads—the same ones it pays to have broadcast—on its Facebook page, to which over 3m people have signed up as “likers”. Ms Gregory has seen few cases where PR firms have created true social-media-only campaigns: all that is happening is that social-media elements are being added to traditional marketing plans.

As for reaching those new social media “influencers”, most of these still get their basic information from old-fashioned news providers, as do most powerful and influential people. Lord Bell is sceptical, too, pointing out that PR men have talked of rising to the top of big firms for years.

But even if the PR men are in danger of believing their own spin about the opportunities the online world will bring, at least they are showing signs of adapting to it and finding ways to use technological change to further their business. They may not achieve the power and glory they have ached for since the industry’s early days. But it is clear that another century of spin, perhaps greater than the one gone by, is in prospect.

While we wrote a proper case study on our 2007 CAFE Standards public affairs campaign years ago, this is the first time I really sat down and explored one of my favorite blogger outreach and digital PR campaigns — one we did in support of MSHC Partners, RIP, and the National Environmental Trust three years ago.  Thanks to the gang at Agencyside for publishing Case Study: Blogger Approach for Air Cover today:

Case Study: Blogger Approach for Air Cover

In 2007, Abraham Harrison (AH) worked on a public affairs campaign with MSHC Partners in Washington, D.C. to collaborate with the National Environmental Trust to pass the Energy Bill veto free.

To this end, MSHC Partners and AH needed to run an integrated campaign. MSHC bought targeted advertising and placed full page issue ads into the local papers of key politicians while AH was taking these ads and turning them into online content and copy. This included copying-and-pasting into blog posts, identifying bloggers and influencers in these markets, messaging thousands of them, letting them know about the ad, about the message, and about the issue.

I call this sort of thing ‘air cover.’ The political operatives are in the local market doing very powerful issue-oriented work, but all of this hard work can be very ephemeral. What we were able to do was to turn newspaper, magazine, television, radio ads, spots, and interviews into a series of web-accessible Social Media News Releases (SMNRs). This allowed bloggers to easily know, through targeting email messaging, what was happening at that moment in their communities. Bloggers are not paid to keep on top of everything that’s going on in their community. It would be impossible for MSHC to have been able to both produce the content, get it into the papers and on the air, and also discover, identify, classify, and then message thousands of relevant bloggers.

In many cases, AH had the content, the challenge, the copy, and the full-page ad in Colorado bloggers hands the day before the full page ad showed up in Mark Udall’s local Colorado newspaper in the morning. How? We were able to get the art, convert it from an Illustrator or Photoshop file and into something that bloggers could use. A full text copy of the ad’s message and an easy-to-copy hosted scan of the full page ad itself in several widths including 200px, 400px, 800px, were standard. Also, print-ready files so that any journalist who learned about our leaked content from the SMNR could run the story too.

We did this all around the country, capturing interviews and getting them onto YouTube and around the Internet. We collected audio from interviews and made that available and we stalked online commentary and coverage and made that available too.

When Click and Clack, the Car Talk guys, went to Washington to support Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFÉ) standards for fleet vehicles, we took their letter to congress and made the text available and photos of the letter available. When activists delivered candy to the House and Senate over Halloween with messages of how spooky the world will be if the Energy Bill didn’t pass, we covered that and made the photos and the handouts available to bloggers. And when Prius drivers in Philadelphia took to the streets to conduct a drive in to protest the Toyota Tundra and Toyota Sequoia, we were there, collecting photos and news from the event, collecting fliers and news reports, and the collecting all of those media and assets into an easy-to-use release. We were air support.

Of course, we didn’t just post web sites, releases, and microsites on the Internet hoping for bloggers to find these resources. We instead were able to identify, locate, and secure the names, email addresses, and blog names of thousands of interested bloggers and message them based on their passion.

We were able to rally an extraordinarily broad and diverse base of supporters ranging from left wing environmentalists, through the moderate Democrats and Republicans, all the way over to the national security oriented America First supporters. Each had their own reason to want to pass the Energy Bill and CAFE standards: from save the planet to energy independence. We were not afraid to prospect conservative bloggers just because it was a “green issue” … because it wasn’t.

We were able to collect bloggers not just in terms of their politics or their topical interest in cars, efficiency, politics, or whatnot but instead we identified them based on their demographics as well as their location. We basically collected every Philly blogger and let them know about the Prius event. We then identified every Colorado blogger to let them know about how the National Environmental Trust coalition, including the Union of Concerned Scientists, was challenging Mark Udall for his vote and support. We did this all over the country, primarily to bloggers but also to online message boards, forums, Usenet, Listservs, and social media outlets.

In the end, AH reached an estimated 250,000 online influencers and mobilized countless formerly passive activists all across the political spectrum. Support for the higher CAFE standards rose online and offline, and the political pressure mounted tremendously. The White House backed away from their veto threat, and the Democrats recognized the higher CAFE standards as essential. On December 19th, 2007, the Energy Bill passed, complete with the higher CAFE standards.

Chris Abraham, a blogger since 1999 and online since 1983, lives between Washington, DC, and Berlin, Germany, and is president of digital PR and online communications company Abraham Harrison. Abraham Harrison LLC, founded in late 2006, is a global digital PR and online communications firm spread over 4 Continents, 7 Countries, and 14 Time Zones, with clients that include Kimberly-Clark, US Olympic Committee, Sharp, Habitat for Humanity, and others.

Chris Abraham is President of Abraham Harrison LLC. Chris is a leading expert in online public relations with a focus on blogger outreach, blogger engagement and reputation management. You can connect with Chris on Twitter by following @chrisabraham.

This morning I wrote 10 Essential Tips for Social Media Brand Engagement but realized over the course of the day that I need to be even more explicit when it comes to helping you all engage most effectively with the denizens of the Internet, be it on blogs, social networks, message boards and forums, via email, email lists, or groups. Here are another five, all dealing with follow-through, accountability, follow-up, attentiveness, under-promising, and over-delivering (via Marketing Conversation):

1. Do what you say you’re going to do: I keep on telling people that social media marketing and digital PR is equal parts logistics, organization, and hospitality. Everyone focuses on the charm part of the relationship but a man is judged on keeping his word. Keep your word.
2. Over-communicate online to let your customer know what’s going on: the first thing a visitor should hear, almost immediately, is “@chrisabraham Hi, I just saw this. Let me see what I can do. I’ll get back to you in a few with more information.” Then, “@chrisabraham I just spoke to my manager and he’s getting approval for the refund. I will be back to you soon.” If you don’t over-communicate, visitors may feel dismissed
3. Private messages and DMs are only for private information, bring the conversation back into the spotlight: don’t just impress your single guest with your mad skills and your ability to solve problems and deliver results. Once you get the account info, name, address, and phone, bring it back into the light and solve the problem
4. Only mention solutions that you are empowered and authorized to offer: even if you unintentionally lead a visitor on with promises of a full refund or over-nighting a replacement, if you are not authorized to solve a problem, don’t even mention it until you get an express OK from whomever is authorized to make the decision — just keep the customer in the loop every step of the way (see #2)
5. After all the charming, responding, communicating, and authorizing, you are not off the hook until you provide a solution: always beware to offer the solution that your visitor or customer wants rather than the solution you want to give because someone who’s mad just gets madder if they don’t get satisfaction. Be willing to give ’til it hurts

OK, that’s it for now. For your convenience, I will include the original 10 Essential Tips for Social Media Brand Engagement below:

1. Don’t play favorites in social media: everyone germane to your brand now has a platform and a voice online.  The “A-list” is just one constituency, and not always the most influential.  The “B-to-Z List” is enormous, active, and very influential to their audiences; treat them with full respect
2. People are busy online so respect their time and respond to their requests immediately: respond to anyone who engages within the hour, no matter who they are, if possible. If they’re being neutral or positive, it shows respect; if they’re hostile or contentious, an immediate response can prevent a war and win them over
3. Do not pour all of your resources into top influencers: find a way to engage through the long-tail
4. Remember that you’re always in public when you’re online: not only your tweets and blog posts are public; whenever you email someone or  connect with them via DM or via private message, it just takes a simple copy-and-paste for any and all of your correspondence to go public online.  (always assume everything you do might very well end up on the front page of the New York Times)
5. Always be responsive, timely, generous, and friendly: always engage horns with hugs. Irony and snark does not work. If you are every accused of anything untoward, accept, apologize, and move back to solving the issue
6. Keep as much of the conversation online and in public as possible: while you may be tempted to bring the conversation offline, keep all of it online until the point you need to exchange personal data and account numbers
7. The primary value of online customer support is being publicly generous and responsive: don’t just pop in and pull everyone who engages with you onto the phone, into email, or over to a private direct message but take the opportunity to spend as much time as you can having a public, open, friendly, and helpful conversational back and forth.
8. Engage online and in the public eye for for as long as you can: great advice from Zappos’ Thomas Knoll: why rush the open ticket to closed? Why not spend the time to actually build rapport? This isn’t a call center proper. Why not keep folks chatting back and forth for as long as they’re interested?
9. Never turf any question or query: never drop someone a link when you can write/talk them through it and please, never, ever, tell them to look it up on Google or send them to an FAQ. Each question is an opportunity to engage and teach (and also be seen engaging and teaching)
10. “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle”: this is a quote from the philosopher Philo of Alexandria (20 BC – 50 AD) that we at Abraham Harrison live by.  When folks online snap, are mean, short or even angry, we know it is never really at us. Everyone’s busy and has a first life and we just wander into somebody else’s messes. Our only job is to be as helpful, responsive, nice, generous, patient, and friendly as humanly possible

Here are the top ten things we at Abraham Harrison remember every day as we engage online and deal with global bloggers, tweeters, and Facebookers in the thousands over many clients in half-a-dozen languages.  They’re social media engagement tips we have sorted out together as a team, added to things I have learned online since 1983 (Via Marketing Conversation):

1. Don’t play favorites in social media: everyone germane to your brand now has a platform and a voice online.  The “A-list” is just one constituency, and not always the most influential.  The “B-to-Z List” is enormous, active, and very influential to their audiences; treat them with full respect
2. People are busy online so respect their time and respond to their requests immediately: respond to anyone who engages within the hour, no matter who they are, if possible. If they’re being neutral or positive, it shows respect; if they’re hostile or contentious, an immediate response can prevent a war and win them over
3. Do not pour all of your resources into top influencers: find a way to engage through the long-tail
4. Remember that you’re always in public when you’re online: not only your tweets and blog posts are public; whenever you email someone or  connect with them via DM or via private message, it just takes a simple copy-and-paste for any and all of your correspondence to go public online.  (always assume everything you do might very well end up on the front page of the New York Times)
5. Always be responsive, timely, generous, and friendly: always engage horns with hugs. Irony and snark does not work. If you are every accused of anything untoward, accept, apologize, and move back to solving the issue
6. Keep as much of the conversation online and in public as possible: while you may be tempted to bring the conversation offline, keep all of it online until the point you need to exchange personal data and account numbers
7. The primary value of online customer support is being publicly generous and responsive: don’t just pop in and pull everyone who engages with you onto the phone, into email, or over to a private direct message but take the opportunity to spend as much time as you can having a public, open, friendly, and helpful conversational back and forth.
8. Engage online and in the public eye for for as long as you can: great advice from Zappos’ Thomas Knoll: why rush the open ticket to closed? Why not spend the time to actually build rapport? This isn’t a call center proper. Why not keep folks chatting back and forth for as long as they’re interested?
9. Never turf any question or query: never drop someone a link when you can write/talk them through it and please, never, ever, tell them to look it up on Google or send them to an FAQ. Each question is an opportunity to engage and teach (and also be seen engaging and teaching)
10. “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle”: this is a quote from the philosopher Philo of Alexandria (20 BC – 50 AD) that we at Abraham Harrison live by.  When folks online snap, are mean, short or even angry, we know it is never really at us. Everyone’s busy and has a first life and we just wander into somebody else’s messes. Our only job is to be as helpful, responsive, nice, generous, patient, and friendly as humanly possible

The conversations over at Chris Abraham and at Olivier’s Blanchard‘s blog The BrandBuilder Blog, are driving me crazy because the debate is between two camps: the “you cannot outsource your online, social media, relationships to an agency, you need to keep them in-house, intimate, and authentic” and those who believe that people are less fussy and just want awesome customer service by anyone.

When I started Abraham PR in October 2006 — becoming Abraham Harrison in March 2007 — I was the result of over 15-years of online experience and three years in online marketing and PR and I knew better then, and I know even better now:

In general, people are too busy and too focused on their actual real lives to care about the “authentic” voice of a company they buy stuff from, to care about intimacy-building, or to really be interested in pursuing friendship relationships, they’re interested in finding a way to engage your brand quickly easily, simply, and conveniently; they’re interested in reaching out with their issue, concern, challenge, or questions; and they’re keen to get an immediate response and a timely, generous, and worthwhile solution.

That’s it.  They primarily want service from your company – not love, not friendship.  Service.  Fast, effective, personal, competent service.  Building relationship is not unimportant, but providing great service is primary if your relationship is a commercial one.

When we reach out to bloggers by the thousands every day, we win them over not by becoming their chums but through giving them what they need, when they need it, and with the sort of respect and promptness that is often reserved only for what are generally called A-list blogs, high-influencers, celebrities, and journalists — the so-called “worthies” with their high-end compete.com and Klout scores, with their mainstream media acumen and high UMV’s.  Relationship builds over time with these bloggers, but first, foremost, and immediate is providing them information they want in the way they want it.

Every engagement online — be it a newbie blogger, a Facebook user with an average 80 friends, a tweeter with only a hundred followers — needs to be handled with the same kid gloves that are too often reserved for online royalty: the Wall Street or NY Times tech blogger, the tippy-top AllTop bloggers, and the majestic few with decade-old blogs, a million Twitter followers, and 5,000 friends.

The sort of behaviors traditional digital PR, digital marketing, and digital advertising agencies exhibit on a daily basis need to be harnessed and run further afield than just the Technorati, Tweeterati, Bloggerati, Facebookrati, and celebrities and to anyone and everyone.

What this means is that every single mention, ping, comment, discussion, debate, petition, unofficial page, wall post, tweet and retweet, blog post, blog comment, message board and forum discussion, and group chat needs to not only be monitored but considered for engagement. To be engaged openly, transparently, in plain sight, and also in a very timely manner — no matter who they turn out to be.

I try to read the New York Times every day on my Kindle.  Today I caught Squinkies Maker Savors Demand for Holiday’s Hot Toy in today’s paper.

What caught my attention was that the article suggested that a massive outreach to over 300 mommy blogs was what tipped Squinkies into the super-hot toy category for Christmas 2010:

The retailers liked the Squinkies well enough. “The orders were good, but nothing like what we anticipated this could be,” Mr. Nichols said.

He knew the retailers would test it in August. To pique interest before Squinkies were even on sale anywhere, he reached out to more than 300 bloggers, sending them products for review and giveaways.Anne McGowan, who runs the blog DealWiseMommy.net, said her son and her nieces understood what the toy was right away, from playing with vending machines in restaurants. And she was relieved at the low price. “That’s one of the best things about the toy: they’re not very expensive,” Ms. McGowan said.

In Waterloo, Ont., Erica Kloetstra, who runs BassGiraffe.com, said the collectible angle pulled in her 4-year-old daughter. “She’s like ‘Now we have to get this, and this, and that.’ That’s why we have so many,” she said.

While tiny toys can be choking hazards, the retailers and Blip emphasize that the toys are for children age 4 and up. And bloggers noted the same. “Due to the small size, my son (which is 2) has placed them in his mouth,” Amanda Blake, who runs FairyGoodMommy.com, wrote, saying that her older daughter now plays with them in her own room. “I do not recommend anyone under the age listed on the package to play with them or have them lying around.”

“Mommy bloggers are incredibly powerful,” said Ms. Phillips of Wal-Mart, in part because they explain to their readers what a toy does or what age it’s appropriate for. “Just getting customers aware of what they are, how do they work, what do I do with them” is quite helpful, Ms. Phillips said.

When the toy hit shelves in August, “the read was fantastic,” she said.

This especially excites me because most blogger outreach and blogger engagement campaigns limit their outreach to only 25-50 very popular blogs, over time. Other campaigns aren’t generous enough with their “give” and limit the number of review and test products they’re willing to drop-ship to each blogger.

Abraham Harrison LLC, my agency, has been doing massive long-tail blogger outreaches for our entire life, since March 2007. We routinely identify and reach out to thousands of bloggers — all of the bloggers in any particular demographic or topic — and commonly receive hundreds of requests by bloggers for more information and for review copies and test products.  That’s the key.  That impact. That impact is powerful and important, especially with seasonal products such as toys, for example.

When it comes to blogger outreach, it is important to get as much volume and penetration as possible.  The only tried and true way we have found to do that is to locate every relevant blogger and reach out to them all, engaging them all in a friendly and responsive way, and then send anyone and everyone who requests one, a review copy — of a book, of a toy, of anything — never saying no to the tune of hundreds, even. In other words, the more successful the outreach campaign, the more expensive it could become and the more gratis product you’ll have to deliver.

But too many clients shy away from this and say things like, “we’ll only honor the first 30,” or “we have only budgeted for 70″ and this is actually the wrong tactic.  Do what Mr. Nichols of the Squinkies did: he sent Squinkies to every blogger who wanted one. Sure, Squinkies are inexpensive, but even in the case of more expensive products, considering the amount of general overhead surrounding books and other products, the cost of not becoming hot and getting the kind of coverage and excitement generated can be failure and defines the saying Penny-Wise, Pound-Foolish.

When it comes to limited blogger outreach that only focuses on the “top-25 most influential blogs,” whatever that means, it is hard to push or goose the tipping point. The only way you can move the needle is to stop playing favorites, stop limiting the number of review copies and products, and reach out to any and all bloggers, regardless of their Klout and compete.com score, who are germane to the product, service, outreach, brand, and campaign.

I hate to be salesy but what the hell — come check out my company’s testimonials, case studies, and client list.

Wow!  What a firestorm. In the several days since Olivier Blanchard wrote Stating the obvious and I shot back with Can you outsource your Social Media presence to an agency? there has been 71 Comments on The BrandBuilder Blog and and — gasp — 89 comments on this blog!  So, I will be spending the long holiday weekend bringing together some of the most interesting commentary.  Today I will focus on some of the comments shared by my CEO, Mark Harrison, since he’s smart, savvy, and passionate while not really being much of a blogger so this is rare and great stuff.

The first comment by Mark is about how our agency, Abraham Harrison, can and does run social media campaigns and blogger outreach campaigns on a daily basis, effectively and seamlessly, and also aggressively and passionately over years to powerful effect:

Brilliant conversation! I do love all the analogies and metaphor-creation (and I’ll probably come back in a bit to give you my US Congress/Afghan tribal leaders/Pashto-speaking diplomats analogy…), but let me take a moment to pull this out of the theoretical and go into factual, boots-on-the-ground real life data for a bit.

As Chris mentioned, for some of our clients, Abraham Harrison has been handling their social media top to bottom with business-changing results. Just one example from a client who called us in originally because they were getting steamrolled with negativity in social media and needed to turn things around before it killed the public’s and their investors’ perceptions of them:

In one year:

• From an average of 5-10 strictly negative daily mentions on Twitter to 20-50 positive daily mentions and retweets reaching an average of over 122,000 people and making over 270,000 impressions a week
• More than 20,000% growth of Twitter followership: from 498 to over 100,000 followers
• From 3rd most followed company in their sector to 1st, with more Twitter followers than all of their competitors combined
• Over 45,000 Facebook Likes (starting from 0) and over 37,000 active users. From an average of 5-10 daily interactions on Facebook to over 175 daily interactions, and over 55,000 impressions a day (and all of this growing on a hockey-stick curve)
• Tripled blogosphere mentions in 10 months time

And ROI?

• Unique Monthly Visitors for the client’s site went from 50 MM/month to 129 MM/month
• Client’s membership base grew from 500,000 to over 2 million

This is just one of our clients for whom we handle social media efforts – and not even the most impressive example, just the one I happened to have all the stats on hand for right this instant.

Yes, some companies should consider doing their social media in-house. They should consider doing the search and hiring process, finding the techies, communications people, creatives, project managers, researchers, division executives, and perhaps foreign-language specialists to do the all the work. They should consider what it will take to train up all these folks and build out the infrastructure to support them. They should consider the timeline for all this to take place before they have a complete, coherent, effectively-functioning team in place, and the budget that build will take. They should consider the opportunity cost of the opps they are missing while they are pulling themselves together, and the risk that even with all this budget and effort, they don’t really know if the team they assemble is actually going to be knocking it out of the park when they finally get to work.

And, as an alternative, they should consider simply hiring Abraham Harrison for probably less than the cost of the one top exec they’re going to hire to spend all this budget and fill up th office space with all the well-paid staff they’re going to have to house and resource. And… if they hire Abraham Harrison, they know they have a team with a well-proven track record of extraordinary success in social media operations, with the ability to operate globally in 10 languages.

And… it’s risk-free. If one day the company decides they want to bring it in-house, they call me up and say, “Hey Mark, it’s been great…” and we go away. Try dissolving an in-house team overnight to switch to outsourcing. Neither cheap, nor easy.

Thanksgiving dinners and wedding planners and analogies and metaphors here or there, we have clear facts in black and white: outsourcing your social media to us at Abraham Harrison with our proven track record is going to get results starting the day you flip the switch, and will most likely do it at a significantly lower cost, at a much higher level of efficacy, and at a vastly lower level of risk than if you opt to try to build a social media department in-house.

Mark also wrote a very similar thing over at Olivier’s blog I’ll share here as well:

Hey Olivier,

Thanks for firing up so much valuable discussion – both here, and over on Chris Abraham’s blog. Thank you for all your comments there – let me reciprocate with some of what I wrote there in response to your comments:

The long and the short of it is that, actually, a company can successfully outsource the handling of client relationships in social media. We’ve got years of results and clear facts that show it. I know it offends your theory pretty directly, but the facts are facts, and it simply works – often better, and at lower cost than companies trying to handle the social media work in-house.

It’s good to draw up guidelines to help companies find their way in this new landscape, but when reality runs counter to the rules you make up, you have to adjust them accordingly. The fact is that the real world results show your rule #2 to be incorrect. so you should adjust that.

[ . . . ]

Yes, some companies should consider doing their social media in-house. They should consider doing the search and hiring process, finding the techies, communications people, creatives, project managers, researchers, division executives, and perhaps foreign-language specialists to do the all the work. They should consider what it will take to train up all these folks and build out the infrastructure to support them. They should consider the timeline for all this to take place before they have a complete, coherent, effectively-functioning team in place, and the budget that build will take. They should consider the opportunity cost of the opps they are missing while they are pulling themselves together, and the risk that even with all this budget and effort, they don’t really know if the team they assemble is actually going to be knocking it out of the park when they finally get to work.And, as an alternative, they should consider simply hiring an agency like ours for probably less than the cost of the one top exec they’re going to hire to spend all this budget to build up a new team. Then they know they have a team with a well-proven track record.

And… when it’s outsourced to an agency like ours, the risk is vastly lower. You know you have an effective team from the first day, and if one day the company decides they want to bring it in-house, they can call up and say, “Hey, it’s been great… we’re not re-upping the contract.” and they are free.

It is important to create theories, and guidelines, and rules, but they have to reflect real-life results. The real-life results show that you can very successfully outsource your social media work and get the best possible ROI at much lower costs and lower risk than doing it in-house.

Your item #2 is not obvious. In fact – and in the face of the facts, it’s simply wrong. (And, obviously, #10 by extension is also wrong…)

Most of the other stuff though, is both obvious, and like most of what you write, right!

And then, after Mark got lots of push-back from Olivier himself, Mark came back to expand upon his thoughts:

Hey Olivier -

Did you miss the “ROI” part – right after the SM metrics I quoted?

And ROI?

• Unique Monthly Visitors for the client’s site went from 50 MM/month to 129 MM/month
• Client’s membership base grew from 500,000 to over 2 million

THAT’s what increasing their Twitter followership by 20,000% did for the client, THAT’s the dollars-on-the-table value tripling their blogsphere coverage got them, THAT’s why our getting them 37,000 active fans on Facebook is relevant.

Quadrupling the size of a client’s customer base is absolutely the “helping this client meet their business objectives”. Lordy, Olivier, what more could you want as evidence that outsourcing social media to experienced pros is indeed often a really, really good business decision?

And my aim in this discussion is not to prove that my firm gets results – our clients, and much of the business world know that. My aim is to move this conversation towards real-world facts and away from un-backed theorizing, arbitrary rule-inventing, and finger-wagging fire-and-brimstone preaching. That is what irritates and alienates the business world and undermines the credibility of our industry in their eyes.

The fact is, your Obvious Thing #2 – that you supposedly can’t outsource the management of your customer relationships in social media – is just clearly, provable, undeniably wrong, and stating such untruths as gospel and “obvious” hurts our entire industry. There are so many people out there in the business world who’ve come to rolling their eyes at “social media experts” because there is so much unfounded BS and from-whole-cloth blowharding going on in our industry.

Repeating faith-based untruths will never make them true, any more than it made WMD’s in Iraq true. All it does is undermine the credibility of the social media industry.

You are one of the voices out there who speaks very little BS, and I want to help the authority of your voice to remain intact by pointing out when you are preaching an untruth, so you can correct it and not lose the power your words have in promoting our industry in the broader business world.

Please, for the sake of the credibility of your voice, revise your pronouncements to align with facts and real-world results. Otherwise, your valuable voice will slowly erode to being one of those you warn about in your Obvious Thing #10: one not “fit to be consulted on the subject”, and that will not be good for any of us in social media.

OK, I will work on collecting comments from both side

As part of his blog post, Stating the obvious, Olivier Blanchard asked quite a few questions that suggest that it is essential that brands, companies, and so forth, not outsource their social media strategy to agencies.  One of his most pedantic is this one:

“Can you outsource your presence at Thanksgiving dinner to an agency?”

I think that is complete crap because it is not an either/or game. Outsourcing to an agency is like hiring a wedding planner so that you can actually enjoy your own wedding and guests.  The bride and her family choose the planner and the planner works with the family until everything is right, but when it comes to the ceremony and the reception and all the details, a majority of the staffing and operations are taken care of by other people — especially if you’re not an event planner.

This is doubly true if the wedding is going to be huge or formal. Intimate weddings can be self-planned and self-staffed but if you’re going to scale to a Royal Wedding or a Society Wedding, then you’re going to need a lot of help — especially if you want to be freed to have the time to meet all your guests and enjoy the experience yourself.

And all that help, that experience, the logistics, and the staffing and service comes from an agency that is built to offer such services, sort of like my Abraham Harrison.  Here’s the comment I posted onto Olivier’s blog:

“Can you outsource your presence at Thanksgiving dinner to an agency?”

No, but you can outsource everything else.

You can outsource all the cooking, you can outsource all the cooks and cleaners. You can have the turkey cooked and all the food prepared.  You can outsource the drinks table, if the thanksgiving is a large affair.

When it comes to scaling, can you do a thanksgiving dinner on your own if you plan to serve 100?  1000?  If you plan to serve the homeless on Thanksgiving day?  These question and answer sets are so pedantic they make me want to cry, Olivier, mate.

When it comes to a simple thanksgiving dinner, you’re correct, but in the real world, do companies do all the work themselves when they host a holiday party?  Even for their own employees?

No!

They either go to a restaurant where all of the ancillary services are supported by the staff, cooks, waiters, hosts, etc; or, they hire a party planner and make sure, like a wedding, all of the details are “taken care of.”

Agencies — like mine, anyway — serve as the cast and crew to enable to host — you, the brand — to not have to spend all of his time in the kitchen and filling drinks but, rather, where you should be: at the head table raising glasses in toast or mingling around making sure your guests are having a good time.

What people forget is that we agencies should not replace brands but should facilitate and enable brands.  In other words, we’re wedding planners and you’re the bride, groom, and their parents.

The more intimate the wedding, the more the family can pitch in; however, I daresay that the upcoming Royal wedding party will only make the most basic of decisions for the wedding ceremony as there will be hundreds of guests and instead of being sandbagged they wedding party needs to spend some time sharing themselves with the constant stream of guests and well-wishers.

Does that make sense?  Now I am going to cross post this to my blog!  Love the convo, mate, and we need to meet one of these days, for sure!

Via Marketing Conversation and The BrandBuilder Blog

Rodrigo Martucci and Mark Harrison, colleagues from Abraham Harrison, put together this presentation for the Measurement Master Class I did on 17 November to a packed house at meshmarketing 2010 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. (via Slideshare & Marketing Conversation)

However, I sort of went way off script because I am way more of an operations geek and social media evangelist than I am a measurement geek.. I hope this is indeed useful!

Habitat For Humanity asked Abraham Harrison to help promote World Habitat Day 2010. We reached out to all the bloggers who seemed really passionate and interested about helping the homeless and displaced, both on Twitter and on blogs, all of which you can check out below. It was a really great campaign! (Via Abraham Harrison & Marketing Conversation)

1. Oct. 4 2010 Habitat for Humanity via Article Logy.Com
2. THE UNITED NATIONS HAS DESIGNATED THE FIRST MONDAY IN OCTOBER AS ANNUAL WORLD HABITAT DAY. via Muncie Young Professionals Group
3. World Habitat Day – October 4th via My Costa Rica-Facebook
4. Better City via URBLOG
5. World Habitat Day Upcoming Oct. 4 via St. Albert’s Place On The Web – “Your Internet Daily”
6. The United Nations has designated the first Monday in October as annual World Habitat Day. via Southeast Indianapolis Communities
7. World Habitat Day via Aka.alias
8. Mark Your Calendar for World Habitat Day via Mom’s Gone Geek
9. Please support World Habitat Day on Oct 4 with Habitat for Humanity (posted at top of page as link) via Stories On Malawi
10. Charity Time via Devilsadvocateonline.Com
11. First Monday in October is Annual World Habitat Day via ChrisAbraham.com
12. Habitat for Humanity via Helping Hands
13. Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter To Come To Annapolis For Habitat For Humanity Day via Eye On Annapolis
14. World Habitat Awards and Day coming up via Think Change India
15. World Habitat Day: October 4 via Human Dignity And Humiliation Studies
16. World Habitat Day via Open Writing
17. banner via Busco Voice
18. Habitat For Humanity Launches World Habitat Day via Look to the Stars
19. http://bragsimply.blogspot.com/2010/09/world-habitat-day-october-4-2010.html via To be
20. World Habitat Day via Bikes Blues and BBQ
21. World Habitat Day via Greater Good Philippines
22. World Habitat Day via True Travellers Society
23. October 4-World Habitat Day via REAL Magazine
24. World Habitat Day Oct. 4 via Kids Church.Co
25. Habitat for Humanity- World Habitat Day via Schmidt Realty Group
26. Mark Your Calendars for Humanity via The MacMommy
27. What will you build?? via Larry Bikes Across America
28. World Habitat Day-Habitat For Humanity via Houston Living
29. World Habitat Day: Better City via Architechnophilia
30. Before & After: Funky via One Project Closer
31. World Habitat Day via Kulit On The Run
32. Mark Your Calendars for Humanity via The MacMommy
33. World Habitat Day: New York Hedge Funds to Irish Women in Romania via Hedge Fund News
34. World Habitat Day is October 4 via Building My Green Life
35. WORLD HABITAT DAY – OCTOBER 4TH via Dulles Area Association of Relators
36. World Habitat Day via Socially Superlative
37. World Habitat Day 2010 via South Shore Habitat for Humanity Video McElroy Films
38. The United Nations has designated the first Monday in October as annual World Habitat Day via Ismaili Mail
39. Banner Post (Bottom of Page) via I Love Allaah.Com
40. World Habitat Day is Oct. 4th via True Gotham
41. Habitat For Humanity Launches World Habitat Day via Look To The Stars
42. http://habitatforhumanitysfscv.blogspot.com/2010/06/hands-up-to-our-great-youth-volunteers.html via Habitat for Humanity San Fernando/Santa Clarita Valley – Building Better Tomorrows
43. badge via Jazz@Rochester
44. Be a part of World Habitat Day 2010Be a part of World Habitat Day 2010 via the Painting Activist
45. badge via Reach Altitude
46. banner via Puertoricounder.com
47. Email from Liza about World Habitat Day via KI-Media
48. World Habitat Day via Charity Jobs
49. banner via Funds For Ngos.org
50. Celebrate World Habitat Day via Macaroni Kid
51. World Habitat Day October 4 via Green (Living) Review
52. via Dear Spam Diary
53. or Real? via World Habitat Day – Oct. 4 – Fake
54. World Habitat Day Oct 4 via Unitarian Universalist Fellowship at Salisbury
55. Community Announcement: Raise Awareness and Recognize World Habitat Day on October 4th via Networking Phoenix.Com
56. The United Nations has designated the first Monday in October as annual World Habitat Day. via Pollution and its Effect to the Environment
57. Charity to rebuild quake victims’ homes via Community Standards Inc. New Zealand
58. Take Your Picture—-For Habitat for Humanity! via A Moms Love
59. Habitat for Humanity Day via Jane Mitchell’s Blog
60. Habitat for Humanity Day via Jane Mitchell’s Blog
61. Habitat for Humanity World Habitat Day via JollyPeople.com
62. World Habitat Day via Bikes Blues and BBQ
63. World Habitat Awards and Day coming up via Think Change India
64. Mark Oct 4th as World Habitat Day via Operation HOPE
65. World Habitat For Humanity Day via Modular Home Builder
66. World Habitat Day! via Mix97
67. United Nations Asks: How Will You Celebrate Housing Crisis Day? via Fast Company
68. United Nations Asks: How Will You Celebrate Housing Crisis Day? via Business Information
69. World Habitat Day via The National Parks Of The Pacific Islands
70. World Habitat Day is October 4th via Danny Fisher the blog of an American Buddist Chaplain
71. World Habitat Day 2010 via Home Buddies
72. World Habitat Day! How Can We Let You Know How Important It Is? via SavingGhana
73. World Habitat Day via Ain’t That Sweet
74. What Can you do for World Habitat Day? via Ain’t That Sweet
75. Banner Link (Top right) via Yearning for God
76. Facebook – World Habitat Day Social Media News Release via Surviving Motherhood
77. Habitat for Humanity – World Habitat Day via ROBMAC Group – Media Services
78. World Habitat Day is Oct 4th via Why Are You Reviewing Me
79. World Habitat Day Is Oct. 4th via Stella’s Blawg
80. World Habitat Day website via Farm Radio Weekly
81. Tuesday Tip: World Habitat Day 2010 via Not Just A Mommy!
82. Raise your voice for World Habitat Day via Realtor Ramblings
83. What Can You Do To Recognize World Habitat Day via Engineering For Change
84. Cause Marketing Gallimaufry via Cause Marketing
85. World Habitat Day via Climate of Our Future
86. THE UNITED NATIONS HAS DESIGNATED THE FIRST MONDAY IN OCTOBER AS ANNUAL WORLD HABITAT DAY. via PowerPop Overdose
87. World habitat day 2010 via Matterik.com
88. Habitat for Humanity Day 2010 via Non Profits Blog By Steven Hoffman
89. World habitat Day Oct. 4 via Limite
90. banner Link (Top right) via Wicked Gay Blog
91. World Habitat Day on Monday via Patsy’s Ponderings By Patsy Terrell
92. World Habitat Day–October 4 via EVstudio Architecture: Engineering: Planning
93. World Habitat Day is October 4th! via Unfill The Land Fill
94. World Habitat Day via Vikrant’s World
95. World Habitat Day via Chasing Evil
96. World Habitat Day this Monday via Mint Hill Times 24/7
97. Loveland to Observe World Habitat Day via Loveland Habitat for Humanity
98. World Habitat Day- October 4 via Runohio
99. World Habitat Day Draws Attention to Sub-Standard Housing via Celebrate America
100. World Habitat Day- Oct. 4 via Daniel Knapp
101. World Habitat Day- Oct. 4 via Robertson Photography Studios
102. World Habitat Day via Vermont Housing Finance Agency.org
103. Habitat For Humanity via Border Town Blues
104. World Habitat Day – October 2010 via Millionsofmouths
105. Monday via Habitat for Humanity of Greater New Haven
106. World Habitat Day via Mole’s Progressive Democrat
107. World Habitat Day via Mole’s Culture Kitchen
108. Gearing up for the Day of Caring via Blackbaud
109. World habitat Day with Habitat For Humanity 2010 via Sociolingo’s Africa
110. World Habitat Day via Delusional Duck
111. World Habitat Day: October 4th via Volunteer Spot
112. WHAT ARE YOU DOING ON WORLD HABITAT DAY (OCT. 4TH)? via Ghetto Radio
113. Going for a Holiday via Philosophy Recycled
114. World Habitat Day 2010: Better City Better Life via Anders Bekeken
115. World Habitat Day via Black Bath Water
116. World habitat Day is coming Monday via DC This Week
117. Friday Wrap-up: The World Habitat Day Edition via Polka Dot Coaching
118. “Better City via Arch Society
119. Monday via Building For Ghana
120. World Habitat Day via Neatorama
121. Esteem for World Habitat Day via Special News
122. http://oconeedemocrat.blogspot.com/2009/08/first-friday-in-watkinsville-works-well.html#uds-search-results via Oconee County
123. EXIT Realty Supports World Habitat Day via Real Estate Industries Leaders.com
124. Volunteers Join in for World Habitat Day via Sno Valley Star.com
125. World Habitat Day: October 4 via Daily Kos
126. HABITAT FOR HUMANITY AND WORLD HABITAT DAY via Choice Senior Service Llc
127. World Habitat Day Making a Difference One Family at a Time via Localism
128. World Habitat Day via Just The Right Words
129. World Habitat Day via Adventurous Women Blog
130. World Habitat Day via CBC Happenings
131. World Habitat Day via Mike Shinoda Clan
132. October 4th is World Habitat Day via Habitat for Humanity of the Magic Valley
133. World Habitat Day via Pensive Thoughts
134. World Habitat Day 2010 via Feeling Just Peachy in Georgia!
135. World Habitat Day October 4th via Mom Dot
136. World Habitat Day 2010 via Left Word
137. World Habitat Day via Peter Leeson – Things And Whatsits
138. Tomorrow is World Habitat Day via South Walton Scene
139. World Habitat Day Oct 4 2010 via Life Is The Colour You Paint It
140. World Habitat Day 2010 via African Agriculture
141. The United Nations has designated the first Monday in October as annual World Habitat Day via Hospitality Industry
142. Oct 4th is World Habitat Day via New Bern NC
143. World Habitat Day via Backyard Missionary
144. World Habitat Day – a UN day to remember the importance of shelter for all. via Canadian Charity Law
145. Poor via Border Town Blues
146. The United Nations has designated the first Monday in October as annual World Habitat Day via Climate of Our Future
147. October 4 via Live the Life of ADreamer
148. World Habitat Day Tomorrow via Eye on Annapolis
149. Habitat For Humanity via True Travellers Society
150. Better City Better Life via Feeling Just Peachy in Georgia!
151. Happy World Habitat Day via Architechnophilia
152. World Habitat Day via FLOCCINAUCINIHILIPILIFICATE
153. Monday via Matterik.com
154. Tomorrow is World Habitat Day! via Samantha Star
155. Oct 4th-World Habitat Day via Ain’t That Sweet
156. Home is Where the Heart via Hole in the Fence
157. World Habitat Day- Habitat for Humanity Int’l via Naturally Connected
158. Today is the World Habitat Day via Funds For Ngos.org
159. WHAT ARE YOU DOING TODAY via This is Africa
160. My Habitat Home: World Habitat Day via My Habitat Home
161. World Habitat Day via Muncie Young Professionals Group
162. October 4 via REAL Magazine
163. World Habitat Day Today via Hedge Fund News
164. World Habitat Day! via Yearning for God
165. Don’t forget! via Chasing Evil
166. World Habitat Day – Oct 4 via Moms Cash Blog
167. The United Nations has designated the first Monday in October as annual World Habitat Day. via Sea Island Habitat For Humanity: Housing Hope
168. today is WORLD HABITAT DAY! via Larry Bikes Across America
169. World Habitat Day Today via Volunteer Centre South Derbyshire
170. Today is World Habitat for Humanity Day via Gathering in Light
171. Today is World Habitat Day- Habitat for Humanity via I Love Deep Creek Lake- Real Estate Blog
172. Today is World Habitat Day- Habitat for Humanity via Deep Creek Real Estate
173. Today is World Habitat Day- Habitat for Humanity via I Love Deep Creek Blog
174. Happy World Habitat Day via Home Fixated.com
175. ECO 4660 is doing our bit for World Habitat Day via Environmental Economics
176. World Habitat Day via Today’s Facility Manager
177. What Are You Doing to Make a Difference for World Habitat Day? via Chicagoland Real Estate Forum
178. World Habitat Day via The National Parks Of The Pacific Islands
179. World Habitat DAY via Poz
180. Happy World Habitat Day via Kiwiluv Tech Blog
181. World Habitat Day 2010 via The Broad Brush
182. World Habitat Day via As Time Goes By
183. World Habitat Day via Still Hate Pickles
184. GreenAdvantage via Twitter
185. gswstrat via Twitter
186. HomeFixated via Twitter
187. VeraSweeney via Twitter
188. Alltop_Social via Twitter
189. Alltop_Social via Twitter
190. AndreaPage via Twitter
191. AndreaPage via Twitter
192. archsociety via Twitter
193. cambodialookout via Twitter
194. chrisabraham via Twitter
195. chrisabraham via Twitter
196. chrisabraham via Twitter
197. chrisabraham via Twitter
198. chrisabraham via Twitter
199. chrisabraham via Twitter
200. chrisabraham via Twitter
201. chrisabraham via Twitter
202. chrisabraham via Twitter
203. chrisabraham via Twitter
204. chrisabraham via Twitter
205. chrisabraham via Twitter
206. chrisabraham via Twitter
207. chrisabraham via Twitter
208. chrisabraham via Twitter
209. chrisabraham via Twitter
210. chrisabraham via Twitter
211. chrisabraham via Twitter
212. dabydeen via Twitter
213. dans_smyth via Twitter
214. dans_smyth via Twitter
215. deepcreeklaker via Twitter
216. deepcreeklaker via Twitter
217. ecosystM via Twitter
218. ecosystM via Twitter
219. engineer4change via Twitter
220. gregorybell via Twitter
221. jazzrochester via Twitter
222. kidschurchco via Twitter
223. kidschurchco via Twitter
224. kinews via Twitter
225. Lisamarie61 via Twitter
226. Lisamarie61 via Twitter
227. mirandavanz via Twitter
228. mirandavanz via Twitter
229. MNAonline via Twitter
230. MomsGoneGeek via Twitter
231. NoWorkTimes via Twitter
232. nzartguild via Twitter
233. OKtobeWEIRD via Twitter
234. photoRobertson via Twitter
235. PlannedLegacy via Twitter
236. PlannedLegacy via Twitter
237. PlannedLegacy via Twitter
238. PlannedLegacy via Twitter
239. REALMagazine via Twitter
240. REALMagazine via Twitter
241. SarShell via Twitter
242. SarShell via Twitter
243. savvysassymoms via Twitter
244. savvysassymoms via Twitter
245. schoolnurses via Twitter
246. TheMacMommy via Twitter
247. thinkchangeind via Twitter
248. thinkchangeind via Twitter
249. thinkchangeind via Twitter
250. trekaroo via Twitter
251. USAID via Twitter
252. Veshengro via Twitter
253. wobuilt via Twitter
254. wobuilt via Twitter
255. ReachAltitude via Twitter

Abraham Harrison was named a finalist in PR News’ PR Digital Awards in the Digital PR Campaign category for the work we’re doing in developing new communities through online outreach for The Fresh Air fund, via Marketing Conversation.

Digital PR Campaign

• Abraham Harrison LLC – Building Support in New Communities Through Online Outreach for The Fresh Air Fund
• The Clorox Company with Ketchum Public Relations – Clorox Introduces Bleach to a New Generation with Bleachable Moments
• The Coca-Cola Company – Expedition 206: 365 Days, 206 Countries, 1 Mission
• Discovery Communications – LIFE Digital Communications Campaign
• Entergy Communications – Digital Communications Promoting Grand Gulf Nuclear Station’s 25th Anniversary
• Fleishman-Hillard – Gatorade Super Bowl XLIV Campaign
• Hunter Public Relations – Hasbro Family Game Night
• JB Cumberland PR – Curious Chef: A Digital PR Success
• MS&L/Procter & Gamble – Tampax Pearl Outsmart Mother Nature PR Campaign
• National Association of Home Builders – Federal Home Buyer Tax Credit Public Awareness Campaign

At Abraham Harrison, online social media PR is what we do all day, every day, and have been doing for years. We’re not an old-media PR shop trying to quickly jump on the new-school bandwagon, hoping we can figure it out (and making all the mistakes on your dime). We are a well-practiced team of 40+ professionals who work exclusively in the social media world. We’re very pleased to put our skills and experience at your service to deliver the extraordinary impact new media operations can have when  practiced by true online experts.

We’re completely confident in our ability to produce results with clients who wish to leverage online social media – we know our way around this space like few others. We secure you trust, endorsements, top search results ranking, and ubiquitous presence of message — we can get your brand out in front of the world, right in front of the eyes of exactly the people you want to reach, driving your search engine and general online visibility so that your brand is ubiquitous in the  places where your potential clients live online and at the tops of search results – not only having your brand  promoted on your own sites, but getting them endorsed and promoted on the sites and under the names of  the influencers in the online worlds where your customers are waiting for you to meet them.

We do all of this by finding the people you need and mobilizing them to support your aims, be it connecting to decision-makers or activating mass support, we can help you identify, connect with, and mobilize the people you need to be supporting you on the issues that affect you. We can reach out directly  to the people you need to be in contact with or connect with entire demographics in the places they live online.

Abraham Harrison helps you manage your reputation online and protect you online in times of crisis. With the Internet, with its forced transparency and free, instant flow of information, communication and reputation crises can crop up overnight – and with the search engines, even a very old blemish can taint  your or your organization’s image years later and on into the future. We can help you manage crises,  steering communications effectively in the free, open, uncontrollable online medium and we can help you  regain and maintain control of your reputation and image in the search engine results.

Via Abraham Harrison LLC

Social and digital media have created a new and constantly evolving world of communication challenges and opportunities for every organization.

Advocacy has been transformed by social media and online advocacy services are essential in today’s climate where news, rumors, gossip, misinformation, and disinformation spread online as fast as electricity through the wire.

Our social media services offer online monitoring so that we can keep on top of what is being said about you, warn you when issues arise, and recommend a course of action appropriate to the level of danger to your interests and suitable to the culture of social media.

Additionally, our online advocacy team, currently operating in twelve languages and eleven countries can take what we discover online and reach out to the influencers and engage in social media communities that are already talking about you or are prime recipients of your message.

In addition to monitoring and engaging with online influencers, Abraham Harrison can help you develop and grow your branded social media presence on Twitter, Facebook, blogs — wherever you need to engage your natural allies, respond to information others are putting out there, and promote your brand, your issue, and your point of view.

Our services include creating, building, promoting, responding, and guarding your social media properties with around-the-clock support.

(Via Abraham Harrison and Marketing Conversation)