BL and I adore eachother so I was very excited to receive an email from her last night with a link to her latest article on Business Week, Using social media to market your business is a good idea. Just don’t plan on getting your whiz-kid nephew to do it for free — check it out and check BL out over on her blog, What’s Next Blog. Oh, and when BL asks “how many of them have actually created a successful campaign for clients using social media tools? I bet you’d be hard-pressed to find half a dozen with real track records,” I can proudly state that Abraham Harrison LLC has the expertise, the experience, and the track record to boot!  Anyway, here’s the article:

Debunking Six Social Media Myths

For companies, resistance to social media is futile. Millions of people are creating content for the social Web. Your competitors are already there. Your customers have been there for a long time. If your business isn’t putting itself out there, it ought to be.

But before you take the plunge, bear in mind the many myths that surround social media.

1. Social media is cheap, if not free. Yes, many of the tools that can be employed in social media marketing are free to use. These include Google’s (GOOG) video-sharing site YouTube, Yahoo’s (YHOO) photo-sharing site Flickr, the social-network building tool Ning, and content aggregators such as Digg and eBay’s (EBAY) StumbleUpon. Free blogging tools abound too; among them are WordPress, Twitter, and FriendFeed.

However, integrating these tools into a corporate marketing program requires skill, time, and money. The budget for an effective social media marketing campaign begins at $50,000 for two to three months. I’m sure companies have spent less, and I know they’ve spent more.

Building a site that incorporates interactivity, allows user-generated content, and perhaps also includes e-commerce doesn’t come cheap from anyone who knows what they are doing. Even taking free software like WordPress and making it function as an effective interactive site, incorporating e-commerce, creating style sheets that integrate with the company’s branding, takes more than time. That takes skill, experience, and money.

As a rule, a $50,000 to $100,000 budget can cover the creation of a simple multimedia microsite that becomes the center of an online community. Add in some widgets to help distribute the content and form a credible group on Flickr, Twitter, or Facebook and other networking groups to enhance the community aspect of the campaign. Complex functions add to programming and design costs.

A high-yield, highly targeted blog advertising campaign to kick off and support the program will cost an additional $25,000 to $100,000 a month. Advertising through Google’s AdWords, e-mail support, co-registration, and other tools that drive traffic would be additional costs.

2. Anyone can do it. A surfeit of whiz kids and more experienced marketers are claiming to be social media experts and even social media gurus. Search the bios of Robert Scoble’s 56,838 Twitter followers using Tweepsearch (www.tweepsearch.com), an index of the bios of Twitter users, and you’ll find:

• 4,273 Internet marketers
• 1,652 social media marketers
• 513 social media consultants
• 272 social media strategists
• 180 social media experts
• 98 social media gurus
• 58 Internet marketing gurus

How many of them have actually created a successful campaign for clients using social media tools? I bet you’d be hard-pressed to find half a dozen with real track records.

A successful social media campaign integrates social media into the many elements of marketing, including advertising, digital, and PR. Opinion and theory are no match for experience, and the best social media marketers now have more than 10 years of experience incorporating interactivity, blogs, forums, user-generated content, and contests into online marketing.

Video contests by companies hoping for viral buzz and Google juice are as plentiful as mosquitoes on a humid summer night. But, like their insect counterparts, most video contests suck.

It’s the rare video contest that gets as many as 2,000 entries. Many, like Denny’s (DENM) recent disastrous effort, get fewer than 10 entries. Apparently, 48 Denny’s breakfasts over four years wasn’t a big motivator.

3. You can make a big splash in a short time. Sure, sometimes a social media campaign can produce substantial and measurable results quickly.

Social media is great if you’re already a star, but that doesn’t happen overnight. Amid the recent launch of my T-shirt design business, Pawfun.com, I have relied heavily on my 4,000-plus Twitter followers and 120,000 readers of my What’s Next Blog, which I’ve updated as often as five times a day since 2003. Because that network already exists, with not one dollar spent on advertising, we were able to generate more traffic in our first three days than some major companies get after years online.

ZapposChief Executive Tony Hsieh, whose company has millions of customers who are evangelists for the great service that built the brand, quickly became a Twitter star, with more than 32,000 followers. When Dell (DELL), JetBlue Airways (JBLU), the Chicago Bulls, and other love-’em-or-hate-’em brands joined Twitter, they immediately developed huge followings.

Tweets can be used to drive traffic to articles, Web sites, contests, videos, and so on—if people already care about your brand, or if you have a truly original idea that people will want to share with their followers.

One recent example of a Twitter-generated success is Savvy Auntie, a community for aunts, godmothers, and “other women who love kids” that was launched six months ago by Melanie Notkin. She has counted on Twitter to drive traffic, help her find suppliers, products, and even investors. She developed a Twitter following before launching her business, then tapped into it for help when she launched.

4. You can do it all in-house. Wrong! You need strategy, contacts, tools, and experience—a combination not generally found in in-house teams, who often reinvent the wheel or use the wrong tools.

It is rare indeed to find an in-house team that can not only conceive and execute a social media campaign but also drive traffic to it with effective e-mail segmentation, search optimization, blogger outreach, blog advertising, Google ads, and more.

5. If you do something great, people will find it. Quite simply, that never was true. Until you can drive traffic to your social media effort, you’ve got a tree falling in the forest, heard only by those standing nearby. A great number of tools can drive traffic, including StumbleUpon, Digg, and Twitter, but nothing works better than word of mouse—one friend telling another, “Hey look at this!”

6. You can’t measure social media marketing results. You can use a variety of methods, including mentions on blogs and in media; comments on the content; real-time blog advertising results, and click-throughs to your company Web site. You can get very precise statistics from a variety of sites, including Google Trends, Twitter search, Google Analytics, BackType, and Compete.

The tools are there. The gurus who know how to use and interpret them—not so much.

Ochman, president of Whatsnextonline.com, has been creating new media marketing and online brand strategy since 1995 for companies including IBM, Ford, McGraw-Hill, Budget Car Rental, Stacksandstacks.com, and American Greetings. She tracks online marketing trends and campaigns in What’s Next Blog.

Back in the late 70s and 80s, Aston Martin made a terrible mistake in a modern interpretation of the Aston Martin Lagonda from 1976-1989. It was the first modern Aston Martin.  It followed the unfortunate trend in the 70s and 80s when European car makers tried to become more like American muscle cars and tried to appeal to the need of the power brokers of the 80s who wanted bigger, faster, shinier, and more powerful emblems for their wealth.  The Lamborghini Countach, the Lamborghini LM002, the Ferrari Berlinetta Boxer, and this model of Porsche 911 are prime examples.

Well, according to Jalopnik, Aston Martin plans to revive the brand:

As rumored, Aston Martin is readying the Lagonda nameplate for an all-newGeneva Motor Show concept. The secret concept, previewing a new brand, is said to be a perfect blend of practicality and performance.

Lagonda was founded in 1906, but was purchased and integrated by Aston Martin in 1947. The Lagonda name has been affixed to Aston Martins since then, and graced the quirky 80s-era Aston Martin Lagonda, but has never been its own brand. According to Aston Martin, the Lagonda nameplate is preparing to celebrate its 100th anniversary next year (no, that makes no sense to us either) and to commemorate the occasion, an all-new concept will debut at the Geneva Motor Show in March.

There’s no telling what this concept could be other than a competitor in the luxury car market filled with Bentleys and Rolls Royces, but Aston Martin is already talking about a production schedule for a 2012 on-sale date. We’ll keep our eyes peeled.

Aston Martin Press Release:

Aston Martin CEO confirms the revival of the Lagonda MarqueAston Martin Chief Executive Officer Dr Ulrich Bez has today confirmed his intention to revive the Lagonda marque.

In a statement today he said, “After my eight years with Aston Martin, four with profitability, and 16 months of independence, it’s time to think about a longer term future. Aston Martin is an honest, authentic brand which builds the most beautiful sportscars combining modern technology with craftsmanship. Next year we will launch the four door Rapide sportscar, and this will be followed by the project ‘one 77′, the most spectacular Aston Martin ever. Aston Martins are currently available in 32 countries but we will remain limited in our market penetration by the pure character of our cars – sportscars.

“We have now investigated and concluded that the revival of the Lagonda brand would allow us to develop cars which can have a different character than a sportscar, and therefore offer a perfect synergy. Lagonda will use a unique design language as Aston Martin does. We will take elements of DNA from the past but will be very future orientated as we are with Aston Martin. With Lagonda offering exclusive, luxurious and truly versatile products with high quality and usability and suitable for both existing and emerging markets, I believe we can be present in more than 100 countries in the world.

“In 2009 Lagonda is about to celebrate its 100th birthday and in its centenary year we are confident that we will show the first concept of a car which could be in the market in 2012,” he confirmed.

I guess this is what another model year of the Aston Martin Lagonda looked like:

Rohit Bhargava from the Influential Marketing Blog just posted a very insightful article about how we entrepreneurs can learn from Twitter, 7 Lessons Entrepreneurs Can Learn From Twitter’s Success — basically, make things easier, better, more open (as in API), and more insidious (all of Twitter’s competitors feel compelled to integrate with Twitter — how insidious is that — open API wins again):

By any measure, the growth and popularity of Twitter has been phenomenal. To say that Twitter has hit mainstream isn’t really the right metric to use. It’s more powerful to note that for a large group of Twitter enthusiasts, to spend even a day without using it would be as bad (or perhaps even worse) than not having email. It has become just that necessary. How did the site get to this point? And what are the lessons that any entrepreneur might be able to learn from how it got there? Here are a few thoughts on the real secrets behind Twitter’s success:

1. Focus on real time. For the socially connected online, there is little use for yet another place to talk to your friends. If anything, we all have too many of those to start with. But a site dedicated to RIGHT NOW stands out. It’s useful in a way that none of the other sites we use are.
2. Skip the extra step. Approving every friend request can be a lot of work – even if you’re not the most popular of people. It does make sense on most social networks, but when it comes to posting updates on Twitter, if you do it publicly, anyone can follow you without approval. The result is that any user’s audience on Twitter can grow exponentially without barriers.
   
3. Force your customers to do less. If you have ever heard the saying that “less is more” – Twitter is the ultimate proof of that. The forced 140 character messages have made us all refocus on brevity, and as a result of this volume decrease, those of us that are constantly overcommunicated look to the site as the one place where we can still feel that we are on top of the flood of communication that rules our lives.
4. Build enough evangelists to compensate when things go wrong. One of the most well known facts about Twitter is that the service has been notoriously unreliable and crashed frequently. Though it is much improved from those days, the site still goes down or loses functionality relatively regularly. Yet it has managed to build up enough power users and evangelists, that people forgive their down times and keep coming back.
5. Integrate with the most popular competition. The single most useful feature I personally uncovered from Twitter was the ability to integrate it into my Facebook page so that may Twitter updates also become my status on Facebook. This demonstrates a fact that many entrepreneurs already know – by integrating with your competition where your “customers” currently are, you make it easier for them to migrate over to your site.
6. Launch where your influencers are. A big reason for the early success of Twitter was their launch at the SXSW Interactive festival two years ago. It was a place where all the influencers that matters for Twitter were already going to be and putting the site in front of them there allowed them to become word of mouth ambassadors for the site following the event.
7. Offer a public ranking or authority. The final element that has helped Twitter to succeed is that it has a built in authority ranking with the number of followers you have. This is located right beneath your username on the site and it’s high visibility means that it is easily the ultimate metric for anyone using the site. And you can’t help but want that number to go higher. 

It is just the time of year when The Fresh Air Fund begins preparing for the summer full of summer camps filled with happy faces and lots and lots of kids from the cities who get to spend their summer vacation out of the city and in the country. It is also a very important time for finding and hiring camp counselors for the summer as well as locating, vetting, and securing host families as well. All of this information is collected on a little informational web site you can check out, but I will excerpt some of this below.

Fresh Air Fund Needs Counselors for Summer 2009!

You love working with children, and that’s probably what we like most about you. Running across the ball field, washing off the glitter glue, or swimming in the lake – with your cabin group laughing around you – you’ll be in your element.

Are you going to be the counselor the children learn to paint with? The one they play soccer with? The one they want to hang out with? Or perhaps the one they read a bed-time story with? Whatever your role becomes, you’ll thrive on the challenge and commit yourself to the cause.

You’ve got to be 18 or over by June 20th to apply, and you’ll usually have completed at least one year of college by the summer. Any previous work with children should always be included on your application.

The experience you’re about to apply for will be like no other, and it’s going to take patience, flexibility, creativity, and a whole lot of self-motivation. But the rewards will be great… overcoming challenges, meeting new friends, playing games in the sun, jumping into the cool lake, painting face masks, hitting a home run, telling stories around a camp fire…

…and then seeing that smile brighten a child’s face.

We’re looking for counselors and program staff for all five of our summer camps – but places fill fast, so get your application in today.

We are now accepting applications for the 2009 season.

What I think the fine people at Fresh Air Fund are looking for Camp Counselors right now, so if you’re interested in applying to become a Fresh Air Fund camp counselor, please apply here. And, if you are on the fence, be sure to check out the below video, see through the eyes of some Fresh Air Fund counselors:

My buddy David Gelles is now a Technology reporter and blogger for the Financial Times and I was so happy to see David writing about Twitter PR, something very dear to my heart, Companies use Twitter to pack PR punch, including Scott Monty of Ford as well as the gang from PepsiCo’s Pepsi Max controversy:

Companies use Twitter to pack PR punch 
By David Gelles in San Francisco

Published: December 30 2008 19:16 | Last updated: December 30 2008 19:16

Twitter, a booming micro-blogging service, is inspiring business to manage its message in 140 characters or less.

Its streams of short text messages, publicly broadcast over the web, are being treated as the new frontline of internet conversation. Companies including Ford and PepsiCo have been dousing public relations fires with pithy communication bursts to the Twitter community.

“There’s a rapid-fire element to Twitter that causes conversations to go viral when something bad happens with a company,” says Jackie Huba, co-founder of the Society for Word of Mouth, an organisation that monitors social media. “Companies that have a Twitter account are prepared. If something goes wrong they can respond.”

PepsiCo turned to Twitter this month after users began posting criticisms of a Pepsi Max advertisement, which depicted a cartoon calorie committing suicide.

Huw Gilbert, communications manager for PepsiCo International, “tweeted”, or posted a public message, in reply. “Huw from Pepsi here,” he wrote. “We agree this creative is totally inappropriate; we apologise and please know it won’t run again.”

Critics saw Mr Gilbert’s post, with one “tweeting” back: “Thank you?.?.?.?for having the guts to get on Twitter on behalf of Pepsi and give us an update on the suicide ad.”

Such personal interaction from a company representative helps defuse a crisis, says Ms Huba. “People like feeling like they’re being heard,” she says.

Scott Monty, head of social media for Ford Motors, used Twitter to deflect criticism away from the carmaker after it filed suit against an enthusiast website that was selling unauthorised Ford decals. Fans of the site posted angry messages but Mr Monty used Twitter to explain the company’s position.

“Part of my job is to humanise the company – you want to interact,” Mr Monty says.

Starbucks, Comcast, JetBlue and Home Depot are among companies using Twitter accounts to promote products and provide customer service.

Bob Pearson, head of communities and conversation for Dell, said his company had generated $1m in computer-related sales through alerts posted to Twitter.

San Francisco-based Twitter is also becoming a platform for a range of media and social networking start-ups using its tools to develop communities and content rapidly, and at low cost.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

Here is a love note to “me” from David Plouffe, Campaign Manager for Obama for America. Barack Obama wants to personally keep me, ChrisTOPHER Abraham in the loop. I hope the Obama White House keeps up this sort of thing. If Barack Obama and David Plouffe are smart, they won’t make me resubscribe after the inauguration, they’ll just continue educating and informing me into the future. Please.

Christopher –

Yesterday, President-elect Barack Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden announced key members of their national security team.

Barack and Joe have asked some of the country’s most experienced leaders on national security, foreign policy, law enforcement, and military matters to come together to renew America’s security and standing in the world.

Watch the video of Barack’s announcement and learn about the national security team.

Hillary Clinton, U.S. Senator from New York and former First Lady, will serve as Secretary of State.

Secretary Robert Gates, the current Secretary of Defense, will continue to serve in that role.

Eric Holder, former Deputy Attorney General and a former United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, will serve as Attorney General.

Janet Napolitano, Governor and former U.S. Attorney for Arizona, will serve as Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

Dr. Susan E. Rice, a Senior Foreign Policy Advisor to the Obama for America campaign, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, will serve as Ambassador to the United Nations.

General Jim Jones, USMC (Ret), former Allied Commander, Europe, and Commander of the United States European Command, will serve as National Security Advisor.

Barack’s national security team has been assembled to represent all elements of American power, diplomacy, and leadership that will be vital in overcoming the challenges of the 21st century.

Watch the video of today’s press conference:

These appointees will be tasked with strengthening current alliances and forging new ones, protecting our citizens at home, defending against our enemies, and promoting our values and moral leadership throughout the world.

While the challenges they are sure to face will be great, the opportunities to unify our country and our world will be even greater.

With your support, we’ll meet those challenges and opportunities with the hope and optimism that has brought us to this moment of change.

Thank you,

David

David Plouffe
Campaign Manager
Obama for America

]]> http://chrisabraham.com/2008/12/02/a-love-note-from-david-plouffe/feed/ 0 http://chrisabraham.com/2008/11/25/my-first-article-for-adage-global-idea-network/ http://chrisabraham.com/2008/11/25/my-first-article-for-adage-global-idea-network/#comments Tue, 25 Nov 2008 23:10:20 +0000 Chris Abraham http://chrisabraham.com/2008/11/25/my-first-article-for-adage-global-idea-network/ Please check out my first article as a writer for AdAge, In ‘Poor But Sexy’ Berlin, Brands Need to Understand Casual. In ‘Poor But Sexy’ Berlin, Brands Need to Understand Casual: To market successfully, you need to understand college kids This is my first post for the Global Idea Network and I am happy to [...]

Please check out my first article as a writer for AdAge, In ‘Poor But Sexy’ Berlin, Brands Need to Understand Casual.

In ‘Poor But Sexy’ Berlin, Brands Need to Understand Casual: To market successfully, you need to understand college kids

This is my first post for the Global Idea Network and I am happy to be here. I aim to post once-a-week about my experience in Berlin and around Europe as an expat. Today, I want to talk a little bit about Berlin, the city its Mayor, Klaus Wowereit, called “poor but sexy.”

Berlin is sexy, poor, and the most casual city I can imagine. Everyone wears jeans, t-shirts, hoodies, and some sort of field jacket. At first I mistook this casualness as slovenliness or poverty. No. Berlin’s casualness is very intentional. In spite of limited cash, Berliners are slaves to fashion and remain current. The moment jeans went skinny, Berlin went skinny. When the world became obsessed with Chuck Taylors, Berliners sported them. Current, as long as the fashion palette keeps to caps, jeans, t-shirts, jackets, and sneakers. When my friend Mark wore the wrong sort of casual his friends staged an intervention: the jeans were all wrong, the jacket was uncool, and the shoes had to go.

It occurred to me that successful marketing in Berlin requires marketing to college kids, who are the epitome of poor but sexy, across the board and for everything. How would you sell a car, a cell phone, a pair of panties, a watch, some gum, a bank account, or a credit card to a teenager and you’ll probably get it right here in Berlin.

When it comes to purchases, Berliners judge each others’ fashion sense like they do at college, where how you were dressed had more to do with style and selection — how you wore it — and less to do with the total cost of purchase and where you bought it. Competition in the marketplace comes from flea markets, hand-me-downs, swap meets, and eBay as easily as it may your competitor. Lots of those skinny jeans and Chuck Taylors were scored used from the 80s. I learned from my friend Libia from Mexico City that Berlin is world famous for its used clothing and consignment stores. There is no stigma associated with getting stuff used and cheap — quite the opposite.

There are other concerns when marketing to Berliners: biking, weather, exposure, and the elements. Like college students, Berliners take public transport and ride bikes every day in all sorts of Central European weather. In fact, I have been told again and again that bicycles are neither recreational nor optional. They’re essential to daily life. Like students going to class in the morning, Berliners need to carry everything they need for the day with them. Necessity demands that Manolos are pretty impractical, as are skirts, heavily-styled hairdos, and exceptionally-delicate makeup rituals.

Berlin casual is not limited to kids in their teens and twenties, however. I am talking about my 39-year-old friend Frank, who pretty much dresses in hooded sweatshirts and jeans all the time (with a fierce family brand loyalty to the G-Star brand, universally popular in Berlin) and, coincidentally, dresses just like his two sons, 8 and 10, as you can see in the photo illustrations. Yes, Frank, who runs a production company called The Lime Machine, approved this post.

I have been invited to be a European correspondent to the AdAge Global Idea Network. I am a resident of Berlin, Germany, and will be mostly reporting my experience in Central and Eastern Europe; however, GIN is a moveable feast — it is global, after all. I hope you enjoy the post. Please consider subscribing to the blog. I plan to post at least once-a-week. Plus, there are a wide assortment of other great bloggers from around the world.

]]> http://chrisabraham.com/2008/11/25/my-first-article-for-adage-global-idea-network/feed/ 0 http://chrisabraham.com/2008/10/09/central-desktop-is-my-choice-for-project-collaboration-and-task-management/ http://chrisabraham.com/2008/10/09/central-desktop-is-my-choice-for-project-collaboration-and-task-management/#comments Thu, 09 Oct 2008 18:01:20 +0000 Chris Abraham http://chrisabraham.com/2008/10/09/central-desktop-is-my-choice-for-project-collaboration-and-task-management/ I have been very happy with Central Desktop as part of the Abraham Harrison business and client services platform. We had previously used Basecamp HQ. I didn’t mind it but my team hated it so I had Sara Wilson and Saul Wainwright go out to explore all of the project management, task management, business management, [...]

I have been very happy with Central Desktop as part of the Abraham Harrison business and client services platform.

We had previously used Basecamp HQ. I didn’t mind it but my team hated it so I had Sara Wilson and Saul Wainwright go out to explore all of the project management, task management, business management, and process management tools out there — a collaboration tool that my team and I could use every day to help synchronize our daily work.

We needed all the help we can get since Abraham Harrison is a virtual and distributed company, spread across 7 countries and 16 times zones. When Saul and Sara finally made their recommendation, they recommended Central Desktop.

Back in April, Saul wrote an article on Marketing Conversation, Central Desktop Does it for us!!, and we received the associated buzz from Central Desktop.

Central Desktop offers a lot of different things, including group shared calendars, collaborative wikis, intranet tools, project collaboration, task management, web conferencing, audio conferencing, extranets tools, project management, forums, group discussions, salesforce.com, global search, online spreadsheets, and iCal compatibility.

We have limited our Central Desktop usage so far to project collaboration, task management, group wikis, asset and file management and storage, group discussions, and the iCal feature. We use Google Apps (Google Docs, Google Mail, Google Calendar) religiously so there are certain things we don’t need from Central Desktop. We’re also slowly drinking the Salesforce.com kool-aid, so I am sure we’ll start making that work for us soon.

Anyway, I am posting Saul’s review of Central Desktop below because I think it is very interesting and I think you’ll learn a lot and maybe check Central Destop out.

Central Desktop Does it for us!!

So, I don’t know if I have mentioned this on our blog. But, we spent months, and I mean literally months looking around for a web based project management tool that met the needs of Abraham Harrison. You would think that this would be an easy mission. Hell no!!

We wanted to dump Basecamp so badly, yet we didn’t wanna go to something else that was kind of….well…ho hum!!! Just when I was at the end of my tether in the search a bit of synchronicity came along and a potential client mentioned Central Desktop to us.

So, off I ran and checked out this software – it was on my list but I hadn’t really give it much of a go. After a week of digging around, having my Executive Assistant dig around in CD – we both agreed that this was the one for us.

It is simple, clean, fast and does what it needs to do. There are elements missing, for sure, but that is a given. My biggest gripe is their need to integrate more time tracking/management capabilities. However, after a phone call with the CEO, Isaac Garcia (heck how often do you get to talk to the CEO of a company as a small time client) he assured me that they are working on many improvements.

What I found so cool about this company (besides their awesome platform) was that they had built this tool up without any major funding, with paying customers – no, “come use us for free” approach in the hope that it would make them popular. No, they did it while having to please paying customers.

So, last week I got an email from Isaac, following up on the phone call we had had a week earlier and he informed me that Central Desktop had just got its first round of major funding – $7 million from Openview Venture Partners. Not bad, not bad at all….especially when you realize that Openview is one of Central Desktops paying customers (well, maybe they will give them a free account).

I like seeing companies do it the old fashion way. Create a good product, get people to buy it and watch it grow. Hell, getting popular off “free giveaways” is always easier, but certainaly doesn’t guarantee a good product.

Congrats Isaac and the CD gang!! We over at AH look forward to more and more slick features and are stoked that you guys are around.

]]> http://chrisabraham.com/2008/10/09/central-desktop-is-my-choice-for-project-collaboration-and-task-management/feed/ 7 http://chrisabraham.com/2008/07/15/i-need-200-families-willing-to-host-a-child-in-august/ http://chrisabraham.com/2008/07/15/i-need-200-families-willing-to-host-a-child-in-august/#comments Tue, 15 Jul 2008 21:08:50 +0000 Chris Abraham http://chrisabraham.com/2008/07/15/i-need-200-families-willing-to-host-a-child-in-august/ My firm, Abraham Harrison, and I are helping the Fresh Air Fund place 200 inner-city kids from New York City into country homes for a free summer vacation this summer.  Please help me out — help me share the opportunity far and wide! The Fresh Air Fund has provided free summer vacations to New York [...]

My firm, Abraham Harrison, and I are helping the Fresh Air Fund place 200 inner-city kids from New York City into country homes for a free summer vacation this summer.  Please help me out — help me share the opportunity far and wide! The Fresh Air Fund has provided free summer vacations to New York City children from disadvantaged communities since 1877. This is your summer to help! The end of July is growing closer and we still have 200 children who need to be placed with host families for this August. If you want to jump on it immediately, please Email Angie, angie@freshair.org and she’ll speed you through the process!

Quicklinks: Help Now! | News Facts | Fresh Air Children | Fresh Air Fund Friendly Town Program | Friendly Town Host Families | Fresh Air Fund Camping Program | Career Awareness Program | About Fresh Air Fund | Donate | Contacts | Multimedia Elements | Social Media | Tag

Here’s the SMNR we developed for the campaign:

Remember your summer vacations? Doesn’t every kid deserve that kind of fun? We have over 200 children scheduled for Fresh Air trips this summer and need your help to host or find hosts! The Fresh Air Fund has provided free summer vacations to New York City children from disadvantaged communities since 1877. This is your summer to help! The end of July is growing closer and we still have 200 children who need to be placed with host families for this August Unless all prospective host families are screened and vetted by the end of July these 200 children may miss out on an invaluable experience Please host a child or help us get the word out that we need folks who can welcome a child from the city into their homes next month One last thing that is actually very important. We are looking for families who want to extend an invitation to a 9-12 year old. We really need more families who want older children and boys Please Email Angie, angie@freshair.org, immediately and she’ll speed you through the process! Or, you can call us at 1-800-367-0003 (212.897.8900) — ask for Angie If you want to help but don’t live in these areas – BLOG about this program, tell your friends, recommend someone, or DONATE There are trip dates set for August 2008 for over 200 children and we need host families to volunteer to host these inner-city children. The dates and locations are as follows: 8/11-8/21 New Jersey: Warren County, Bergen County, Union County, Somerset County, Morris County, Hunterdon County 8/11-8/22 Pennsylvania: Lancaster, Akron, Christiana, Denver, Donegal, East Earl, Elverson, Lititz, Manheim, New Holland, Quarryville New York: St. Massena, Ogdensburg, Potsdam 8/12-8/22 Harrisburg, Pa 8/15-8/22 Central Massachusetts: Acton, Hopkinton, Lexington, Marlboro, Wayland 8/15-8/25 New York Western Fingerlakes: Canandaigua, Canal Towns, Dansville Central New York: Fulton, Marcellus and Oswego Massachusetts: Cape Cod Pennsylvania: Doylestown, Upper Bucks, Lower Bucks, Chalfont 8/25-9/1 New York: Columbia County Red Hook/Rhinebeck (Dutchess County) Albany County Quicklinks: Help Now! | News Facts | Fresh Air Children | Fresh Air Fund Friendly Town Program | Friendly Town Host Families | Fresh Air Fund Camping Program | Career Awareness Program | About Fresh Air Fund | Donate | Contacts | Multimedia Elements | Social Media | Tags News Facts THE FRESH AIR FUND, an independent, not-for-profit agency, has provided free summer vacations to more than 1.7 million New York City children from low-income communities since 1877. Nearly 10,000 New York City children enjoy free Fresh Air Fund programs annually. In 2007, close to 5,000 children visited volunteer host families in suburbs and small town communities across 13 states from Virginia to Maine and Canada. 3,000 children also attended five Fresh Air camps on a 2,300-acre site in Fishkill, New York. The Fund’s year-round camping program serves an additional 2,000 young people each year.   Fresh Air Children Children are selected to participate in The Fresh Air Fund Friendly Town program based on financial need. Children are from low-income communities. Fresh Air youngsters are registered by more than 90 social service and community organizations in all five boroughs of New York City. Fresh Air Fund Friendly Town Program Fresh Air children, boys and girls from six to 18 years old, visit over 300 Fresh Air Friendly Towns in the summer. Fresh Air children on first-time visits to Friendly Town host families are six to 12 years old and stay for 7-14 days. Most families have such a great summer with their Fresh Air child that 65% invite the child back the following summer.   Friendly Town Host Families Fresh Air Fund volunteer host families open their homes to inner-city children for two weeks or more in the summertime. Each Friendly Town community is supported by an experienced local volunteer. There are no financial requirements for hosting a Fresh Air child. Most hosts simply want to share their homes with inner-city youngsters. Host families are not paid. The Fund has a program for placing children who have special physical or emotional needs.   Fresh Air Fund Camping Program 3,000 New York City youngsters, ages eight to 15, attend five Fresh Air camps on a 2,300-acre site in Fishkill, New York. Camp Hidden Valley is for boys and girls with and without special needs, eight to 12 years old; Camp Tommy is for 12- to 15-year-old boys; Camp Anita Bliss Coler is for girls, nine to 12-years old; Camp Hayden-Marks Memorial is for nine- to 12-year-old boys, and Camp Mariah is a coed camp for 12- to 14- year-old career campers. Additionally, 2,000 young people participate in year-round weekend camping experiences. Special features shared by all camps include a planetarium, model farm, wilderness trail and ropes course. Camp Tommy is named in honor of Board member/designer Tommy Hilfiger for his dedication and support of Fresh Air children.   Career Awareness Program The Fresh Air Fund’s innovative Career Awareness Program is designed to help New York City youngsters understand the relationship between school and work and how to make choices that will determine their futures. In New York City, 12- to 14-year-olds participate in job shadowings that offer close-up views of business and a career fair. The year-round program includes weekend camping trips and an intensive three-and-a-half week summer session at the Career Awareness Camp – Camp Mariah. The career camp is named in honor of Board member/singer Mariah Carey for her dedication, support and commitment to Fresh Air youngsters. Career awareness graduates continue to receive support through the PreOccupations Club and benefit from the guidance of volunteer mentors.   About Fresh Air Fund In 1877, the Reverend Willard Parsons, minister of a small rural parish in Sherman, Pennsylvania, asked members of his congregation to provide country vacations as volunteer host families for children from New York City tenements. This was the beginning of The Fresh Air Fund tradition. By 1884, Reverend Parsons was writing about The Fund for New York’s Herald Tribune, and the number of children served grew. In 2007, close to 10,000 New York City children experienced the joys of summertime in Friendly Towns and at five Fund camps in upstate New York. Donate Every year, The Fresh Air Fund gives thousands of inner-city children the priceless gift of fun – and opens the door to a lifetime of opportunities. Whether it’s a two-week trip to the country to visit a volunteer host family, or a fun-filled and educational stay at one of our camps, our programs make for unforgettable memories – and open a world of new friendships and fresh possibilities. We are a not-for-profit agency and depend on tax-deductible donations from people like you to keep our vital programs flourishing. Donate online now Join Our Monthly Giving Program For a few dollars a day, you can have a tremendous impact on the life of an inner-city child. Sign up to be a monthly donor today – easy, convenient, automated and life-changing. Sign Up Now Printable Donation Form If you’d like to fax or mail in your donation, please print out a form and follow the directions below. You can fax a completed form (with your credit card information) to (212) 681-0146 or mail one (with your check, money order or credit card information) to: The Fresh Air Fund 633 Third Avenue, 14th Floor New York, NY 10017 Make checks payable in US dollars to: The Fresh Air Fund. Open a Printable Form Donate by Phone To make a donation by telephone, call us at (800) 367-0003. Please ask to speak with the Development Department. Press Contacts Sara Wilson, Outreach Coordinator sara@freshair.org Jenny Morgenthau, Executive Director (212) 897-8898 Kate Brinkerhoff, Public Relations Director (212) 897-8890 Andrea Kotuk, Andrea & Associates (212) 353-9585 Multimedia Elements Download the Fresh Air Fund logo Social Mediadel.icio.us | Digg it | Google Bookmark | reddit | StumbleUpon | Twit This Tags Fresh Air Fund | Children | Charity | Children’s Charity | Kids | Outdoors | Summer Activities | Summer Camp | Sleep Away Camp | Fun | Inner City | child | Volunteer | Non-profit | Vacation | Campnet | Friendly | Camping

]]> http://chrisabraham.com/2008/07/15/i-need-200-families-willing-to-host-a-child-in-august/feed/ 0 http://chrisabraham.com/2008/07/10/three-mistakes-pr-folks-make-pitching-bloggers/ http://chrisabraham.com/2008/07/10/three-mistakes-pr-folks-make-pitching-bloggers/#comments Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:22:22 +0000 Chris Abraham http://chrisabraham.com/2008/07/10/three-mistakes-pr-folks-make-pitching-bloggers/ Krishna De just wrote an article called How Not To Pitch A Blogger and it is brilliant and useful — “here are three of the many mistakes they made in the pitch:” there was no personal connection in the email to me about why the story may be of interest to me and my readers [...]

Krishna De just wrote an article called How Not To Pitch A Blogger and it is brilliant and useful — “here are three of the many mistakes they made in the pitch:”

• there was no personal connection in the email to me about why the story may be of interest to me and my readers
• they did not give me anything of value to bring to my readers – no inside scoop so to speak or an offer of speaking to me to answer any questions
• they made me click through to read the article in the press – many bloggers won’t take that extra click – and what’s more the article in the press was at best boring and certainly not newsworthy.

Busy blogger’s are like journalists – they want an inside and unique story that is going to be of value to their readers and they don’t have time to have to go into hours of research.

I personally don’t agree with the third bullet point if what Krishna is saying is that the entire pitch has to be inline.  We find that all of our most successful pitches are as long as three brief paragraphs and as brief as one, with an “extra click” in the form of a Social Media News Release (SMNR). Here are some examples we have for I Will Not Be Broken, Survivor Corps, and Life Changing Box, for example.  When it comes to email pitches, you have to have the blogger “at hello” and the trouble with big, annoying, inline content (inline in the body of the email or, egad, offered as an attachment) is that it is stuck in the INBOX and isn’t readily available to the blog — inline graphics can’t be copied and pasted to a blog post, but if you copy and paste something from a web page, it easily posts.

Offering content in an attachment or an inline pitch makes it impossible for simple posting — images and graphics break because they’re often locally hosted and not available online.

If you off-link to an SMNR, the blogger can readily copy and paste the content and also, in the copy-and-paste, include the inline graphics, images, and links in the blog post itself.

When we create a pitch and then link off the blogger pitch to an SMNR, we try to KISS — every extra link and extra paragraph and extra “rich text element” such as HTML and inline graphics that a pitch includes increases the change — the probability — that the pitch isn’t even going to get to the blogger and will end up either in the SPAM box or, even worse, stuck in the maw of the ISP itself.

The more brief and plaintext the pitch is, the better.  We absolutely refuse to include more than one link from our pitches, even killing all hot links from the signature or anything else.

If you don’t have the blogger at hello, you’re done for, no matter how you do it: inline or linked-out.

Via Krishna De’s BizGrowthNews

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