Chris Abraham » abraham

Spring Thank You to the Fresh Air Fund Bloggers

Chris Abraham — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 18:40:19 +0000

Thank you again, Fresh Air Fund bloggers and Twitterers, for all the support you have shown the Fresh Air Fund and us, Abraham Harrison, in support of finding both camp counselors and host families for this summer season, 2009! We are so grateful for your support and look forward to working with you in the future! Here’s everyone — and if we missed you, please let me know!

A Sneak Peak of Tomorrow’s Webinar

Chris Abraham — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 18:26:15 +0000

Here’s a sneak peak of tomorrow’s webinar, Can You Do PR Without Traditional Media:

I am happy to be a guest presenter for Sally Falkow’s Expansion Plus’ complimentary webinar entitled Can You Do PR Without Traditional Media — it should be really fun and it is free and on Tuesday, March 10th, at 1PM Eastern. Sign up today!

Expansion Plus Announces a COMPLIMENTARY WebinarCAN YOU DO PR WITHOUT TRADITIONAL MEDIA???
Attend our Webinar and find out HOW!!!
MARCH 10TH, AT 10:00 am PST
Expansion Plus is pleased to announce another in our series of WEBINARS and no cost to attend! Tuesday, March 10th, 2009
10 AM PST
11 AM MST
12 PM CST
1 PM EST
With newspapers tumbling around us, how can you do PR without traditional media?
This is a real opportunity for you to learn how to navigate this shift from traditional to online media relations. You will hear from an expert in blogger relations who has worked successfully with both companies and non-profits in online media relations. Online media relations is no longer a “wave of the future” but absolutely necessary in order to survive the traditional media and economic downturns.
Our Guest Presenter

Sally Falkow is very pleased to have Chris Abraham as our guest presenter. Chris is President and COO of the social media marketing firm, Abraham Harrison LLC. He has been a social media and technology strategist for over a decade, focusing on online education, virtual community building, web publishing and blogging.

Position your key staff as experts in their field online

Chris Abraham — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 03:22:26 +0000

If you Google the name of our President and COO, “Chris Abraham“, you will see what it means to dominate the search engine results and own a position as an expert in a field. We can do the same for your key staff.

Methods: Blogs — Yours & Others: Dominating the Online Space as an Expert & Generous Contributor. We will get your blog infrastructure and your content production policy established. This involves installation, set-up, and design of the blog software. To drive SEO it is important to get the relevant social bookmarking, ping server, etc. accounts and plug-ins set up and installed.

To further drive SEO, a powerful additional methodology is to mirror your blog content across multiple other blogs on highly-ranked blog hosting sites like blogspot, wordpress.com, etc., or under additional aggregation blogs you may set up under your own domain names. This process will be automated at the outset and run without human effort thereafter.

Blog Content Creation Policy
We will help your team get the blogging policy right, following best practices in line with the informational guidelines of your company. There is a clear culture of blogging and respecting and adhering to its norms and expectations will make the difference between you being welcomed as a respected contributor and being mocked as a soulless corporate shill (or an embarrassment and danger to your company).

It is essential to have a clear policy for your company’s bloggers, particularly in terms of outlining and reserving their freedoms as writers. With a clear understanding by the blogger and by the company of what freedoms are allowed, you avoid cramping, overly-careful, stuffy-sounding, self-censoring while also avoiding cringe-inducing embarrassments of inappropriate disclosure and language.

Blog Content Creation System
The best system of content creation is to have the key staff members whose reputations are to be built writing the blog content themselves — that leads to the most honest, transparent, and bi-directionally informative information exchange. However, sometimes those key staff members simply don’t have the time, inclination, or writing talent to create that content. In that case a content creation system and methodology must be put in place:

Hiring or assigning professional bloggers or staffers with good writing abilities to produce the content under their names or
Establishing a ghost-writing system where topics are suggested (by the writer or the key staffer), concept outline given by key staffer, posting written by the professional writer, posting edited and approved by key staffer, posting proofed by editor (optional), and article posted.

If this route is taken, there are workflow blog softwares that can be put in place and set up to manage this process.

Appearing on Others’ Blogs
By generously contributing to the community via bloggers in your spaces, you can get broad coverage and enjoy the implicit (or explicit) endorsement of these influencers. We would help you get these content contribution requests by executing a Blogger Outreach. This is done by:

Giving of yourself in the form of interviews, etc.
Interviews are excellent relationship-builders that give you direct, personal access to the bloggers and builds up a connection for the future. Interviews can be given via:
- Email
- Chat
- Phone
- Podcast (voice)
- Vlog (video — either onsite or via video VOIP)

This list is by order of “live-ness” of the interview with email being very asynchronous, allowing time to reflect and gather info and Vlog interviews being very live.

Guest blogging by the key staff
Guest blogging is very warmly welcomed since it gives bloggers good content that they don’t have to write themselves, and it makes them look good because they are being honored as a valued platform.

Being a guest blogger gives you coverage on another site, increasing the number of locations you are appearing while giving you total control over your message and while driving your SEO by adding link-backs. Additionally, you get the implicit (or explicit) endorsement of the blogger in front of his readership.

It is important to be writing interesting, engaging content as a guest blogger and avoid presenting something that sounds like a callow pitch.

If the key staff member is not interested or capable of doing the guest blogging, then the ghostwriting approach outlined above can be followed

Podcasting and Vlogging (video blogging)
Podcasting is very much like blogging, but in audio format. While it is not as SEO-friendly as text-based blogging, it has a stronger “star-quality” effect, as the listeners develop a stronger human connection to the podcaster. The lower SEO-friendliness can be counteracted by posting transcripts of the podcast along with the podcast itself.

It can be done very simply, but generally it is good to have quality raw audio, a polished intro and outro, and good tone balancing so that the podcast sounds somewhat professional and is auditorily a pleasure to listen to.

We can guide your staff in setting up the recording mechanisms, get your intro/outro composed, and have the raw audio balanced and cut into a finished podcast.

It is also good to have clear, interesting concepts to speak about and an effective style of delivery. It’s easy to be boring or irritating.

While the ghostwriting approach outlined above can be followed, much more responsibility lies on the key staff member who is recording, since it is a very “live” experience — you cannot read a pre-written article and come across as a compelling Podcaster.

The staff of Abraham Harrison, LLC, can get the transcripts written and assist in the posting of the podcasts and the maintenance of the podcast blog website.

Vlogging follows the same rules as podcasting in regards to production and quality, but the pressure on the “star” is that much more intense.

Abraham Harrison’s staff can guide your staff in getting the recording and production infrastructure set up.

An advantage of vlogging is that it has the even higher “star” effect upon the key staff member doing the vlogging, and the videos can be posted on all the video-sharing sites (dozens) to get more coverage and dominate search results.

We at Abraham Harrison can handle the video asset distribution for you, or train your team in the method.

Contact Mark Harrison, CEO of Abraham Harrison, for more information

Online Community Involvement and becoming a Respected Hero

Chris Abraham — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 03:18:55 +0000

We at Abraham Harrison, LLC, can win you tremendous respect, gratitude, and powerful word-of-mouth promotion from the very word-of-mouth driven online communities. The staff of Abraham Harrison can be answering the questions people are asking and providing needed information to make you a valued, respected, and trusted members of the communities.

Our goal is to ensure that your brands are perceived as trusted member of society, contributing more than they are taking. Such good citizenship is rewarded in the online community by word-of-mouth endorsements, both at the influencer and at the grassroots level, both of which we will seed, encourage, and amplify.

The staff of Abraham Harrison, LLC, can be present for you in the forums, social networking sites, (SNS’s), and comment-based conversations and use these contributions as “gifts” for both the influencers and for us to leverage in spreading the “good news” about your brand.

In addition, the staff of Abraham Harrison will set your key staff members up as influencers themselves with their own platforms via a blog, and potentially via podcasts and video blogging. The information they present can be made to be valuable, desired, and will make them trusted and honored go-to people.

Contact Mark Harrison, CEO of Abraham Harrison, for more information

Abraham Harrison. LLC: True experts in online PR, not just old-media PR doing an add-on

Chris Abraham — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 02:38:40 +0000

There is a misconception among many old-media PR shops that online PR is pretty much like the old-school stuff, just in a different place. This could not be further from the truth. New media online PR is a completely different world, a totally different culture, and an entirely different approach. It’s not easy, or anything for amateurs, but it is very effective when done correctly and with enough commitment.

Results by True Online Experts
We at Abraham Harrison are completely confident in our ability to produce results with clients who are willing to commit the resources and focus to online efforts — we know our way around this space like few others. We also know that there is far more to being a surgeon than reading how an operation is done, far more to being an engineer than having the blueprints in your hands, far more to being a chef than being able to read a cookbook.

Securing you Trust, Endorsements, Top Search Results Ranking, and Ubiquitous Presence of Message
The staff of Abraham Harrison can get your brands out in front of the world, right in front of the eyes of exactly the people you want to reach. We can make stars of your key staff members and position them as trusted experts before the world.

We can drive your search engine and general online visibility so that your brands are ubiquitous in the places where your potential clients live online and at the tops of search results — not only having your brands promoted on your own sites, but getting them endorsed and promoted on the sites and under the names of the influencers where your customers are waiting for you to meet them.

We’re happy to take you there. Your future customers are waiting out there online for you. We will help you find them, make sure they trust you, and establish you as the people they want to come to. We’re looking forward to working with you!

Contact: Mark Harrison, CEO & Chris Abraham, President and COO, Abraham Harrison, LLC

Abraham Harrison’s Beginnings: Washington, DC and a thatch-roofed hut on Zanzibar

Chris Abraham — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 02:26:02 +0000

We at Abraham Harrison, LLC, have built our entire company around enabling our team members to live and work from anywhere in the world; as long as they have a good internet connection and their laptop.

In fact, Abraham Harrison, LLC was formed three years ago while our CEO, Mark Harrison, was living and volunteering in a small fishing village on the southern tip of Zanzibar. His thatch-roofed hut had no running water, but it had electricity and a 3G mobile internet connection.

Chris Abraham, who was then running AbrahamPR.com, called up Mark, who had run a successful virtual consulting firm over the turn of the millennium, and asked him if he would take over the CEO role of Chris’s rapidly growing PR company. Mark agreed, but on the condition that the firm would be built as a virtual company that would allow all co-workers to work from wherever they happened to be in the world.

Mark now has a proper roof and even running water in his houses in Mauritius and Berlin, but the ethos of the firm has remained the same: our company lives 100% on the internet, and our people can live anywhere.

Abraham Harrison operates smoothly around the clock, spread across 14 time zones, with all of our documents, systems, and information in the cloud, being accessed and collaborated upon by our team members via their laptops, Blackberrys, and iPhones, under the shade of a palm, in the powdery snow of the Rockies, or in the bustle of Berlin or Washington, DC.

Abraham Harrison, LLC: an expert global PR team of travelers and expats

Chris Abraham — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 02:21:28 +0000

Abraham Harrison, LLC is an online PR and Brand Promotion firm that not only knows the online social media lifestyle like no other PR shop worldwide but lives the traveler and expat experience every day.

Abraham Harrison is a 18-person shop with team members spread across the world – the United States, Germany, Holland, South Africa, India, Nepal, and Mauritius. Our CEO, Mark Harrison, who has been an expat for half his life and a traveler for far more, splits his year between Mauritius, and Berlin, Germany. Our President and COO, Chris Abraham, splits his year between Germany and Washington, DC.

Our head of technology is an expat in Nepal, our Director of Operations lives between San Francisco and Capetown, and one of our project managers is currently spending two years in Holland, another works from Brazil when she is there volunteering. Together, the members of our team have lived in or visited 52 countries. We speak not only English, but German, French, Spanish, Afrikaans, Swahili, and Hindi.

Earned Media for SEO and Profit

Chris Abraham — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 18:27:43 +0000

I just received this newsletter from the gang over at WebProNews AU, Blogging To Better SEO, that puts into words a lot of what we do for our clients every day as part of our Social Media consultancy and even what we do incidentally for our Public Relations clients.

With all of our social media outreach, we at Abraham Harrison LLC work on providing earned media for our clients. As I wrote in The current crop of advertisement methods is too ephemeral, it is important to decide where you want to spend your limited resources. Do you want to spend it on contextual ads? Contextual ads can drive a lot of traffic immediately to your target, to be sure, but when you stop paying for your key words, everything comes to a halt. All that traffic goes away… and, even while you’re paying for the ads, the conversion might not be there — it might just be a waste of money, a budget burn.

When you put your time and budget into blogger outreach, social media outreach, and blogging, your results may be less immediate than they are with ads, but whatever coverage you get, whatever earned media — and it can be an astounding amount of coverage, too — never goes away. Never! It becomes permanent record on the Interwebs, stashed and findable on Google until the Internet collapses through some sort of evil DNS hack.

Blogging To Better SEO by Manoj Jasra
[...]
[Manoj]: Why kinds of benefits can an organization expect with the implementation of a blog (and some of the natural SEO benefits that come with a blog)
[Lee Odden]: When a blog publishes AND promotes useful content, the benefits include:
More content to be spidered by search engines and an increased footprint of the brand via search
More links from other sites to the blog and improved search engine visibility
Non-search engine traffic from social media sites and direct links from other blogs
Direct communication with customers and prospects via RSS
Depending on the blog structure and content, increased contacts by journalists that want to use blog content or authors as subject matter experts
Increased leads or sales as a result of blog content – direct or indirect
[...]

Father Abraham Had Seven Sons

Chris Abraham — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 13:18:52 +0000

“Abraham (between 2000 BC/BCE and 1500 BC/BCE) is regarded as the founding patriarch of the Israelites whom God chose to bless and be a blessing to all the families of the earth. He is a critical figure in Judaism later adopted by other religions like Christianity, Islam, and the Bahá’í Faith. The accounts of his life found in the Book of Genesis (and for Muslims and Bahai, those in the Qur’an also) are believed to be accurate within the major religions respectively associated with these books, but they have sometimes been assumed to be myths (as opposed to factual) by some secular historians.”

Via Wikipedia

Father Abraham, had seven sons. Seven sons had Father Abraham.
And they never laughed, and they never cried. All they did was go like this:
With a left! (punch left fist into air) With a left!
(Now, move your left fist up and down in time to the music.)
Father Abraham, had seven sons. Seven sons had Father Abraham.
And they never laughed, and they never cried. All they did was go like this:
With a left! (punch left fist into air) With a left!
And a right! (punch right fist into air) And a right!
(Now, move both fists up and down in time to the music.)
Father Abraham, had seven sons. Seven sons had Father Abraham.
And they never laughed, and they never cried. All they did was go like this:
With a left! (punch left fist into air) With a left!
And a right! (punch right fist into air) And a right!
And a left! (move left leg) And a left!
(Now, move both fists up and down, AND move left leg in time to the music.)
Father Abraham, had seven sons. Seven sons had Father Abraham.
And they never laughed, and they never cried. All they did was go like this:
With a left! (punch left fist into air) With a left!
And a right! (punch right fist into air) And a right!
And a left! (move left leg) And a left!
And a right! (move right leg) And a right!
(Now, move both fists up and down, AND move both legs in time to the music.)
Father Abraham, had seven sons. Seven sons had Father Abraham.
And they never laughed, and they never cried. All they did was go like this:
With a left! (punch left fist into air) With a left!
And a right! (punch right fist into air) And a right!
And a left! (move left leg) And a left!
And a right! (move right leg) And a right!
And the head! (shake head) And the head!
(Move both fists up and down, both legs, AND your head in time to the music.)
Father Abraham, had seven sons. Seven sons had Father Abraham.
And they never laughed, and they never cried. All they did was go like this:
With a left! (punch left fist into air) With a left!
And a right! (punch right fist into air) And a right!
And a left! (move left leg) And a left!
And a right! (move right leg) And a right!
And the head! (shake head) And the head!
And the body! (shake body) And the body!
(Move everything in time to the music.)