Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun is not the work of a Glock fanboy like many of these gun books are.

It is the gun version of Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World. Of course it is an historically-accurate representation of the life and times of Gaston Glock and everything GLOCK, Inc., and its line of handguns.

Some accounts claim that Glock developed his gun in just six months, or perhaps even three. Glock himself said the process lasted a year—still a startlingly short period of time for a novice firearm designer to produce a prototype. He filed for an Austrian patent on April 30, 1981. It was his seventeenth invention, so he called his gun the Glock 17. Coincidentally, his creation could store an impressive seventeen rounds in its magazine, with an eighteenth in the chamber, if the user so desired.

It is also a complete history of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, a history of gun-related politics and policies, and also a very accurate and sober portrayal of America’s love for and of guns.

For the first time, in 2008, the US Supreme Court stated clearly that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to private possession of handguns in the home, as opposed to a right related to the maintenance of a civil militia or other armed force. The court by a 5–4 vote struck down a Washington, DC, law that effectively prohibited private handgun ownership. In 2010, the high court extended its ruling to other municipalities and states, invalidating a similar law in Chicago.

In the same way you read Cod even though you’re not into fish or fishing, you really should read Glock even if you’re not into sports shooting.

If you’re anti-gun, you’ll learn both about the culture of firearms in America and how powerful and intelligent — savvy — a force your enemy really is.

If you’re pro-gun, the Glock revolution will blow your mind, especially in contrast with how pathetically every gun manufacturer in the world performed against GLOCK, especially poor Smith & Wesson, a company that watched as GLOCK came in and single-handedly replaced every .38 Special revolver in every police station in America with not only a high-capacity, semi-automatic, magazine-fed pistol, but with a Glock 17.

The Glock, introduced in the 1980s, inherited all aspects of the American firearm heritage: It was seen as an instrument of law and security, but also menace, danger, and fear. It became the handgun of choice for cops and a favorite of some demented mass killers. Its black plastic-and- metal construction set it apart from everything else on the market, suggesting modernism and efficiency. The handgun is the weapon Americans really care about, and within a decade of arriving here, the Glock had become the ultimate American handgun.

I can keep on going.  Each story is more amazing than the next.  The chutzpah of Gaston Glock is only bettered by the cajones of his right hand man during the early days in Atlanta, Mr. Karl Walter, a man who turned the conservative and serious world of arms sales and arms dealing in America into a discotheque, into a circus, into a strip club, into a world of Hollywood action flicks, rap music videos, and an army of Glock devotees that is only bettered by those mad men and women who are obsessed with their antiquated 1911s.

Let me explain why I know so much about this book and it’s not even out yet.  Well, I read an advanced Galley copy of the book.

On November 4th, Paul Barrett contacted me to review his upcoming book, Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun. He chose me because I guess I am pretty open about both my gun ownership and my attraction to Glocks.

Though I have only been shooting for a year, I already have a pretty nice collection of three Glock handguns: a Generation 3 Glock 23 in .40 S&W, a 9mm First Generation Glock 17 — the original — a retiree from the DC police department, and my Generation 4 Glock 26, my  Baby Glock, in 9mm.

So, in an exemplary blogger outreach campaign, Mr, Barrett sent me a Galley copy to read. And I read it. I consumed it and was mesmerized. I was mesmerized by how much I didn’t know about these United States, about gun legislation, about gun bans and bans on high-capacity magazines.

I was flabbergasted by the loopholes in these bans that were so big you could taxi a 747 through them.

I was not mesmerized by the typical fanboy depiction of their favorite gun and gun maker, I was mesmerized by a book written by an investigative journalist who dug deeply into the GLOCK empire and its ripple effects on not just Law Enforcement but popular culture, rap music, politics, television, and hundreds of movies.

I really didn’t know anything about the history of firearms in America or how they’re sourced and have been banned; how they’re imported — or, rather, sourced and then assembled — and how they’re marketed and sold.

Glock built a veritable cash machine, with margins in the neighborhood of 70 percent—the kind of performance that would warrant a Harvard Business School case study were Glock not so secretive about his decision making. Few outsiders knew how he had accomplished what he had done.

And that’s not even scratching the surface of all that is GLOCK, Inc, and its illustrious founder, Gaston Glock, an Austrian nerd who ended up developing, designing, and producing the most iconic pistol since the Colt 1911.

Glock asked the colonels to describe the Army’s requirements for a new handgun, which they did. “Mr. Glock, in his credulousness, said it shouldn’t be difficult to make such an item,” according to an official company account published years later. “To him, the handgun was simply another accoutrement that attached to a soldier’s belt, similar to the knife he already produced.” Or, as Gaston Glock himself put it in an interview: “That I knew nothing was my advantage.”

If you liked Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, Salt: A World History, The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell, Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, or Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, you’ll love Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun by Paul M. Barrett.

Related articles

• Reading a galley of Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun (chrisabraham.com)
• Glock denies slowing for Hamilton (autonetinsurance.co.uk)
• Gabby Giffords District Republicans Raffle a Glock! (outsidethebeltway.com)
• Ariz. GOP raffling off Glock gun (politico.com)
• GOP raffles Glock in Gabrielle Giffords’ district (cbsnews.com)
• Cleaning a Glock (or the 2nd Amendment argument), never looked so good! (Video) (politicsandfinance.blogspot.com)
• Pima County GOP Officials Raffle Same Type of Gun Used in Tucson Shooting (foxnews.com)
• Pima County GOP Raffling Glock, Same Gun Used in Giffords Shooting (abcnews.go.com)
• Glock admits need to ‘google’ 2012 teammate Pic (inautonews.com)
• Virgin’s Glock starts work in McLaren simulator (inautonews.com)

I had breakfast with John Bell of Ogilvy a number of years ago. He didn’t see the value of investing limited budget, time and resources on the long tail when those treasures would better be used to woo the high-fliers, professionals, top-cows and A-listers.

That’s fair enough, and surely a common question, and a question we must address close to the beginning of every sales call we make at our agency when we propose blogger outreach to a prospective client.

The value comes from penetration, permanence, perseverance and persistence. There are only a finite number of members of every organization’s email list. Mashable and TechCrunch have a sizable but vertical (narrow) audience. When we reach out and pitch to thousands of bloggers, however small or niche, if they’re within maybe one but generally a handful of loosely defined topics, we always reach well outside of the echo chamber of a conversation that tends to get contained within the walls of a tech blog or mommy blog.

By reaching out ever further, we don’t assume that anyone outside of the five major urban centers are obsessed with the top five major papers or the top five major blogs. Doing so makes the critical mistake that if you get covered by the FT, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, you’ve got the world covered. In fact, I will use a newspaper analogy to try to illustrate my point.

The top A-list blogs and bloggers are analogous to David Gelles and the top journalists at the FT, the Times, Washington Post and the Journal. Though highly prestigious, getting your new startup covered by Mr. Gelles may very well not be enough. Outside of Chicago, New York, LA, San Francisco, Washington, DC, Boston and Miami, the United States is also a collection of regional, city, town and village daily papers as well as weeklies and newsletters and journals, both academic and professional, and email lists and Web-only news sources.

People have only a finite amount of time, so their consumption of content, information, news, reviews and alerts is limited. The closer you can get to the media organ that your target market consumes primarily and religiously, the higher the probability that content will register with the reader, will resonate with the reader, and will feel like it is intimate to the reader and his local community and experience of the world.

The Internet is such a gift. Never before has it been remotely possible to reach out to thousands of publishing platforms in one go, with just a team of five, globally or geographically, with a couple follow-ups and concierge service, with the reliable results of hundreds of posts and their associated tweets, retweets and secondary coverage. Add to this long-tail “theory of everyone” campaign a more one-to-one, relationship-based, Rolodex outreach to your most connected agents to-to list and you can have all the mentions in the rarefied air of the A-list as you can manage in the time allowed (and with what you have to pitch — sometimes the quality or sexiness isn’t there and it can be a super-tough sell, requiring horse-trading, etc.) in addition to the hundreds of earned media mentions that one can very reliably acquire — with the first posts showing up two weeks after the contract is signed and going on for another four weeks.

Building connections with the top influencers

One of the biggest issues with A-list outreaches that I experienced when I was at NMS and Edelman is that what happens when you only have a prior relationship with only a handful of top-tier semi-professional and professional bloggers and blogger networks that are germane to the topic or demographic of the client? What happens if you don’t know enough and the ones you do know aren’t interested or don’t think it’s interesting or a viable post?

There are times when you’ve been given a huge retainer by a huge client to push a “meh” product to an A-list that’s not interested and the time passes, the bell rings and you’ve rolled snake eyes. Nothing. No coverage — or very little, surely not aligned to the client’s expectation — or your boss’s.

We discovered that we were a lot less vulnerable to panic attacks when we bought insurance. At my agency, we do pursue A-listers, of course. But those relationships are real. They take time. Since we don’t have a strong vertical, we don’t know who we’re going to need to engage in the A-list at any one time. And, when we do sort out the A-list in any particular blogosphere, thanks to the help of eCairn, then we need to spend time building that connection, personally, with the top influencers. While that is happening, we task our seven blogger researchers with finding everyone else, using a very well-thought-out collection of keyword phrases. In general, we have two weeks or less before our first outreach. The clock is ticking.

Via Biznology & Socialmedia.biz & Marketing Conversation

Related articles

• How to make friends and influence bloggers (chrisabraham.com)
• Agencies are too afraid of bloggers to do their job (chrisabraham.com)
• Fire for effect when you can’t get a direct bead on your market (chrisabraham.com)
• We don’t need no steenking ‘Blogger Outreach’ (globalneighbourhoods.net)
• How to pitch bloggers so they’ll post about you (socialmedia.biz)
• CommentLuv Your Way to Business Prosperity (growmap.com)
• How to pitch a blogger (biznology.com)
• Blogger Outreach: 5 Tips for Connecting With Top Influencers (mashable.com)
• Bloggers and PR: Have we reached an impasse? (customscoop.com)
• Update on eCairn’s Directory of Influencers (ecairn.com)
• Real Americans don’t care much about A-list blogs (socialmedia.biz)
• The Long Tail of Blogger Outreach (biznology.com)
• How to make friends and influence bloggers (chrisabraham.com)
• How to pitch a blogger (biznology.com)
• Sometimes I get excited by something I post (chrisabraham.com)
• Build your Twitter following with a theory of everyone (chrisabraham.com)
• We don’t need no steenking ‘Blogger Outreach’ (globalneighbourhoods.net)
• CommentLuv Your Way to Business Prosperity (growmap.com)
• What Occupy Wall Street Wants: Parsing the Unofficial Demands List (curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com)
• Agencies are too afraid of bloggers to do their job (chrisabraham.com)
• Blogger Outreach: 5 Tips for Connecting With Top Influencers (mashable.com)

Do you focus on the most popular and ignore the rest in social media?

Too many colleagues, organizations, and companies are keeping their circles of influencers small, believing it is better to invest limited time and resources on the most influential, the most popular, and the most celebrated. Happens in DC all the time. I’m rocking the latest dinner party, parlaying attendees with my wit and banter, when someone snazzier and trendier enters. Immediately I’ve lost my audience’s attention. The idea easily transfers to Twitter.

Other users focus exclusively on networking within their own space, effectively limiting scope and reach by preaching to the choir. If you’ve invested in running with the A-list, fine; however, that’s an old model reminiscent of old PR, of the golf club, the lodge, and the private club.

The Internet created something that not enough social media consultants and coaches support and advise: the ability to expand circles of influencers, to engage with anyone and everyone. Only recently has the Internet become ubiquitous and global in a real way. Previously, the digital divide was a barrier to not just many Americans but quite a few developing nations becoming part of the global conversation.

The value of the Internet is proportional to the number of connected users. It’s also living proof of Rule 34. No matter how obscure, vertical, or arcane your material may be, there’s an audience for it. Someone will show it love and attention. Online social networks have made all of this even easier to the point where it is becoming less of a potential and more of a promise, an eventuality. In short, there is real value associated with connecting to as many followers and collecting as many “Likes” as is humanly possible. For real effect.

There’s also a psychological benefit of large numbers. I have won contracts and business on the power of five-digit followers on Twitter, which is modest compared to most of my peers. However, for someone who only has a couple-hundred followers, 38,000 is a lot and suggests mastery. To be honest, I wonder how long it will take these “less is more” social media consultants to realize that it’s not good business to dismiss what the client wants out of hand.

Go beyond the top 100 A-listers

A wider and more open-minded audience has more positive effects than we can realize. Quantity and quality can exist together in this town, but if you’re just going to pick one, go with quantity. For some reason, many of my social media and digital PR folks disagree. Abraham Harrison is almost five years old, just a few months younger than Twitter itself, and my experience is that it’s not as simple as all that. While it is possibly essential to have the attention of the top-100 A-list influencers in your space, it is also essential to attract everyone else as well — and I’ll do my best to tell you why.

The network effect is a lot like chaos theory, but instead of butterfly wings, they’re Twitterbird wings. Every cannon-bomb splash that a Twitter account makes in a tweet in a small network might as well not exist. If a tweet falls in the forest and there’s no one around, does a it make a ripple?

Well, when you reach the whales of Twitter, the celebrities and politicians who have followers in the millions, every single decibel is amplified, considered, scrutinized. It’s the playground from which TMZ and even the nightly news chooses its evening victims. These large networks attract both eyeballs and robots. The spiders from Klout and from Google and Bing as well as from the Twitter top lists are constantly spending their limited resources paying attention, retweeting, auto-tweeting, and indexing the biggest prey on the prairie. And the only people and brands who can do this effortlessly are the folks and companies who already bring worldwide fame and fortune to the party.

In a perfect world, you’d target these folks by the millions, increasing your amplitude and maintaining your authenticity because of your popular connections. Because the world is far from perfect, be open-minded about any and all Twitter connections. It’s impossible to gauge all that they bring to the table at face level. But it’s possible to assume that they came to you because they share a scope of interest. It’s possible to assume that their followers share that scope of interest.

In social media on social networks, you cannot choose your fan.

When you initiate a theory of anyone and everyone, you really must embrace the chaos. In social media on social networks, you cannot choose your fan — at least you shouldn’t. I am sure the makers of My Little Pony never thought that they would garner a galloping herd of adult men, Bronies, who are superfans of the child’s show. Who could have guessed.

You might engage in a strict narrow cast of your net, pre-filtering your target demographic; however, you really need to let go and let God. Your product, service, book, tool, experience, and catalog may find deep appeal among an entirely new fan base that you never considered or imagine before. How deep are you willing to go?

You very well may have a primary, secondary, and tertiary target market — well done. However, this is the Internet, this is the long-tail! Don’t forget Rule 34. Engage in the thousands and even the millions, if possible, and allow your quaternary, quinary, senary, septenary, octonary, nonary, and denary markets define themselves.

It works, it really does. Give it a go, give it a test, and let me know.

Via Biznology, Marketing Conversation, and Socialmedia.biz

I just received a note from my charity crush, Miriam’s Kitchen, wherein I serve the Washington, DC, homeless community with fresh and delicious and nutritious food and drink whenever I am in town.

They want to share the issue of mental health on the streets of Washington, DC, amongst their mostly homeless guests.  Here’s their missive in full:

Most of our guests are living with a mental health issue.

Some of our guests have lived with severe and persistent mental illness (like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder) for most of their lives, while others are experiencing issues like anxiety and depression because of the trauma associated with being homeless.

But because of you, we’re able to provide the support our guests need.

• Dr. Steve Steury (former Chief Clinical Officer at the Department of Mental Health and newest MK staff member) works to engage our guests who may not be connected with mental health services and offers psychiatric services including medication management.

• Case Manager Lissa Ramsepaul leads a support group focused on engaging guests who may not be connected to mental health services but have experienced trauma.

• The Department of Mental Health conducts weekly outreach in our dining room during both the morning and evening programs to ensure our guests know of the mental health services available in DC.

• Our 10-member case management department (including 3 licensed social workers) provides support by listening, connecting guests to mental health services, and helping guests who may be in crisis.

• We offer therapeutic groups in Miriam’s Studio each weekday, including Art Therapy, writing and yoga–all designed to improve mental health.

• Our services are provided with dignity and within a trusted community setting–making it more likely for our guests to ask for help in improving their mental health.

Please click here to better understand the mental health challenges our guests face [PDF] And if you have any questions at all, please don’t hesitate to ask.

Since that link is to a PDF and PDFs are Internet-unfriendly, I converted the PDF to inline text from the National Coalition for the Homeless:

Bringing America Home: Mental Illness and Homelessness
Published by the National Coalition for the Homeless, July 2009

PREVALENCE
According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 20 to 25% of the homeless population in the United States suffers from some form of severe mental illness. In comparison, only 6% of Americans are severely mentally ill (National Institute of Mental Health, 2009). In a 2008 survey performed by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, 25 cities were asked for the three largest causes of homelessness in their communities. Mental illness was the third largest cause of homelessness for single adults (mentioned by 48% of cities). For homeless families, mental illness was mentioned by 12% of cities as one of the top 3 causes of homelessness.

RELATIONSHIP TO HOMELESSNESS
Serious mental illnesses disrupt people’s ability to carry out essential aspects of daily life, such as self care and household management. Mental illnesses may also prevent people from forming and maintaining stable relationships or cause people to misinterpret others’ guidance and react irrationally. This often results in pushing away caregivers, family, and friends who may be the force keeping that person from becoming homeless. As a result of these factors and the stresses of living with a mental disorder, people with mentally illnesses are much more likely to become homeless than the general population (Library Index, 2009). A study of people with serious mental illnesses seen by California’s public mental health system found that 15% were homeless at least once in a one-year period (Folsom et al., 2005). Patients with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder are particularly vulnerable.

Poor mental health may also affect physical health, especially for people who are homeless. Mental illness may cause people to neglect taking the necessary precautions against disease. When combined with inadequate hygiene due to homelessness, this may lead to physical problems such as respiratory infections, skin diseases, or exposure to tuberculosis or HIV. In addition, half of the mentally ill homeless population in the United States also suffers from substance abuse and dependence (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration). Minorities, especially African Americans, are over-represented in this group. Some mentally ill people self-medicate using street drugs, which can lead not only to addictions, but also to disease transmission from injection drug use. This combination of mental illness, substance abuse, and poor physical health makes it very difficult for people to obtain employment and residential stability.

POLICY ISSUES
Better mental health services would combat not only mental illness, but homelessness as well. In a survey by the United States Conference of Mayors (2008), 20% of cities listed better coordination with mental health service providers as one of the top three items needed to combat homelessness. Contrary to popular

belief, many homeless people with severe mental illnesses are willing to accept treatment and services. Outreach programs are more successful when workers establish a trusting relationship through continued contact with the people they are trying to help.

Even if homeless individuals with mental illnesses are provided with housing, they are unlikely to achieve residential stability and remain off the streets unless they have access to continued treatment and services. Research has shown that supported housing is effective for people with mental illnesses (National Mental Health Association, 2006). In addition to housing, supported housing programs offer services such as mental health treatment, physical health care, education and employment opportunities, peer support, and daily living and money management skills training. Successful supported housing programs include outreach and engagement workers, a variety of flexible treatment options to choose from, and services to help people reintegrate into their communities (National Mental Health Association, 2006). Homeless people with mental illnesses are more likely to recover and achieve residential stability if they have access to supported housing programs.

Unfortunately, lack of funding is a significant barrier to the successful implementation of supported housing programs. Funding is available from various programs run by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, as well as from the Projects for Assistance in Transition from Homelessness (PATH). Additionally, the United States Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) in February 2009, which includes $1.5 billion for homelessness prevention and re-housing (National Alliance to End Homelessness, 2009). However, there are still not enough resources to provide adequate services to the homeless population and those at risk for homelessness. Efforts need to be made to ensure that these funds are used appropriately, efficiently, and in ways that will most effectively help the mentally ill homeless population.

SOURCE
National Coalition for the Homeless
2201 P Street, NW Tel. 202-462-4822
Washington, DC 20037-1033 Fax. 202-462-4823
Email. info@nationalhomeless.org

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This afternoon I wrote a post entitled EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to Attend Anti-Mining Soiree Tonight and I guess it is happening right now at the Supreme Court building in Washington, DC. I was looking around and I came upon another mention that I hadn’t seen way back at a little before 1 today, Guest post: EPA chief Lisa Jackson’s conduct ‘grossly improper’ on the PJ Tatler:

Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is hosting a reception at the Supreme Court today for various opponents of the proposed Pebble Mine project in Alaska.  Politico’s Morning Energy reports that one of the attendees will be the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson.  And I have heard that Jackson will be speaking to the group.

Jackson’s conduct is grossly improper.  Environmental pressure groups have petitioned the EPA to deny a Clean Water Act permit for the mine before the company developing it has even applied for the permit.  Appearing at what is essentially a pep rally for those opposing the mine means that Jackson has already taken sides in the bitter political and legal dispute.

If you have not read my earlier post easier, I am going to include it after the jump:

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to Attend Anti-Mining Soiree Tonight

I was really surprised to read this morning that acting EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson plans to attend an event sponsored by former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in an activist effort to block a gold mine in Alaska.  While this sort of private passion is all well and good in the private sector, it doesn’t have a place in the public sector.  In the public sector, America needs Lisa P. Jackson to have the wisdom and character of Solomon instead of pushing her personal agenda in such public view.  In our public officials, I expect neutrality, I expect pragmatism, and I expect exemplarism — leading by example and maintaining a strong sense of integrity, commitment to the public good, and a focus on America’s greater interests.

Here are some articles from this morning going into more detail about the event tonight and about the issue at hand, one from Politico PRO (via email), one from the National Review, and one from Politico proper:

Politico PRO: Justice O’Connor, EPA’s Jackson to appear at anti-mine event by Patrick Reis

PA Administrator Lisa Jackson and former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor are headlining a campaign this week to block a massive Alaska gold mine near one of the world’s largest salmon runs.

O’Connor is hosting an invitation-only reception at the Supreme Court building Thursday for a coalition of conservationists, commercial fishers, sport anglers and Alaska natives who are in Washington this week to ask the Obama administration to ban the potential gold mine near Bristol Bay.

Jackson is scheduled to speak at the event, giving advocates access to the administration official who has the power to put that ban in place.

For years, mining companies Anglo American Plc and Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd. have been exploring the “Pebble Mine project,” a potential open-pit gold and copper mine near the headwaters of Bristol Bay. The partnership has not formally proposed to build a mine and insists that any mine it does build would be designed to protect the environment.

But the opponents say any mine would pollute the watershed that salmon depend on. They want the EPA to issue a pre-emptive veto of the Clean Water Act permit that the mine would need to go forward. The agency agreed in February to study the site to see how mining would affect the salmon fishery.

Politico: Previewing Obama’s energy speech – Stabenow offers third Dem EPA alternative – White House lobbyist departs for Entergy by Josh Voorhees & Darren Samuelsohn (Additional reporting by Robin Bravender, Patrick Reis and Darren Goode)

BIG FISH – Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is hosting an invitation-only reception this evening to bolster opposition to a potential gold mine near Alaska’s Bristol Bay, home to the one of the world’s largest salmon runs. O’Connor will host a delegation of Alaskan salmon advocates – including environmental groups, commercial fishing outfits and Alaska natives – who are in town this week to ask EPA to pre-emptively block multinational mining outfit Anglo American from building an open-pit gold mine in the bay’s headquarters. They may get to take their case straight to the top, as a source tells POLITICO’s Patrick Reis that Lisa Jackson will attend the event as well.

National Review: More Fishy Political Activity by Justice O’Connor by Ed Whelan

Whether rightly or wrongly, former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor maintains that she now has senior status and can sit on lower-court cases. Yet she somehow feels free to engage in crass political activity that is inconsistent with the Code of Conduct for United States Judges.

I would think that everyone would agree that O’Connor’s latest instance of political misconduct is especially fishy. According to Politico:

O’Connor is hosting an invitation-only reception this evening to bolster opposition to a potential gold mine near Alaska’s Bristol Bay, home to the one of the world’s largest salmon runs. O’Connor will host a delegation of Alaskan salmon advocates – including environmental groups, commercial fishing outfits and Alaska natives – who are in town this week to ask EPA to pre-emptively block multinational mining outfit Anglo American from building an open-pit gold mine in the bay’s headquarters. They may get to take their case straight to the top, as a source tells POLITICO’s Patrick Reis that [EPA head] Lisa Jackson will attend the event as well.

Fish jokes aside, how is it that a sitting federal judge (or, more precisely, someone who believes herself to be a sitting federal judge) can somehow imagine that it is proper for her to help organize a political campaign aimed at influencing a federal agency?

Some people go online to experience their second life. I, on the other hand, have a second life in Berlin. Maybe my third life is online and my avatar flies around right above the ground in Third Life.

This is Frank Merfort of The Lime Machine. He is a sound designer and a recovering rock star and a father of two boys and quite an amazing chef, host, and interior designer as well.

He made salmon for Joya, Travis, Claudia, and me and we drank a red, a white, a red, and then grappa. The salmon was drizzled in a cream sauce with baby shrimp and.

We started with a salad with roasted pine nuts. We ended with vanilla ice cream with a dark chocolate drizzle.

All this on just a Wednesday night. I don’t know if Berlin is amazing or whether Mark and Frank’s friends are stellar.

I just think I am a lucky sod because all of my friends in Washington, DC, and also New York, NY, and in Boston, MA, and in San Francisco, CA, are pretty stellar, too.

I think I am just simply a lucky git and that’s all there is to it. Thank you, Travis for texting the invite; thank you Frank for making the meal and offering up your new hip Motzstraße apartment in Nollendorfplatz, Schöneberg, Berlin.

Thanks to Joya for coming with and bringing wine, and thanks to Claudia for adding much charm to the festivities.

Yes, this blog post was written right after getting home from a dinner party after a red and a white and a red and some grappa.

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.

I am watching people in a white panel van restock DC Capital Bikeshare bikes to the vending rack.

My friend Celina reminded me that it is essential to avoid these little red bikes like the plague. Why? They don’t ride their bike to work, they may not own a bike, they almost for sure won’t have a helmet on. They may be drinking-and-cycling drunks, post party.

Capital Bikeshare bikes (one pictures here) are basically worse than Flexcar and Zipcar. Except for one terrible thing: if you hit a Capital Bikeshare bike you’re at fault, either in jail legally or in crisis when it comes to your reputation.

You will always be vilified if you hit a biker, even if it is a dormant rider who hasn’t been on the road in years or decades, doesn’t know the rules of the road, or the laws of cycling engagement.

Mind you, in Berlin, there is a culture of the bike, like there is in Germany, Holland, and in much of Europe. The US, and Washington, doesn’t have this culture ingrained.

That said, I completely endorse the DC Capiaol Bikeshare program. And I endorse the makeover of Washington, DC, to encourage biking and bicycle commuting.

Just expect that there are no omelettes made without breaking a few eggs and I am terribly afraid that these eggs are going to actually be heads and those heads will be under cars right next to Capital Bikeshare bikes.

Thank you to Angela at Lost Property at the Lost Baggage/Luggage office at Reagan National Airport (DCA) and the lost property and lost and found folks in Philadelphia for taking the loss of my treasured Lenovo ThinkPad x61! Within a couple hours of leaving my laptop in the seat back of seat 14A on the red eye flight from San Francisco (SFO) to Philadelphia (PHL) — I guess I was grogged-out — they had discovered it, called me to let me know, secured my FedEx number, and here it is at 0900 the very next day, merely 24-hours later. Again, thank you US Airways. I will never forget this — it is the little things, guys, that make loyal customers!

I just received a note a couple days ago from Ashley Lawson over at Miriam’s Kitchen — an email sent to volunteers at their Washington, DC, soup kitchen for homeless men and women; however, there’s some good general information and interesting stuff for anyone who may be interested in the  current state of homelessness in DC, in America, and some examples of organizations and kitchens that are working every day to help — and the people, like me, who love them:

Guest Facts — So far this year (from January – May), volunteers  have helped to serve a total of 29,515 healthy, homemade meals to our guests.  We truly can’t thank you enough for your incredible donation of time and energy.  Each of you make a huge difference in the lives of our guests.

As you may know, many of our guests sleep on the streets every night and many are battling severe mental health problems.  The warm smiles and conversations you share with our guests are just as important to their survival as the nutritious meals you help to prepare.

In January, we administered a survey of our guests, and would like to share 3 facts with you:

• The average length of homelessness of our guests is 5.5 years
• The age groups of our guests: 18-29: 8%; 30-49: 39%; 50-61: 45%; 62+: 8%
• At the time of the survey, 25% of our guests slept on the street

If you would like a full review of the survey, you may view it here.

What Miriam’s Kitchen Needs — Interested in helping to serve our guests beyond your volunteer shift?  Please consider hosting a donation drive to benefit our guests!  Our top needs for the kitchen and our guests: ground coffee, small bottles of lotion, razors and deodorant.

Since I wanted to give you more context, I grabbed this from the Miriam’s Kitchen website, www.miriamskitchen.org:

How to Help and How to Volunteer –

We are volunteer-driven. Just ask our 1,200 volunteers! This amazing group of volunteers put in more than 12,500 hours of service for Miriam’s Kitchen in 2008–the equivalent of having six additional full-time staff members!

We are always open to ideas for ways that community members can get involved, but here are a few ways you can help:

• Help Serve Breakfast — Breakfast volunteers arrive at 6 am and spend the next two hours chopping vegetables, flipping pancakes, baking biscuits and washing dishes.
• Help Serve Lunch — Lunch volunteers join us on Wednesdays from 11:30 am-2 pm and help prepare lunch, serve drinks and distribute door prizes to our guests.
• Help Serve Dinner — Dinner volunteers are needed every week night from 4-6:30 pm to help prepare and serve healthy meals to our guests.
• Help Prepare Dinner — Volunteers are needed on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 12-2 pm to help prepare recipes for our dinner service.
• Help Our Case Managers — Volunteers are needed to help sort clothes, hand out toiletries and interact with our guests every weekday morning and evening.
• Host a Clothing or Toiletry Drive — We rely on in-kind donations to provide our guests with clean clothing and new toiletries. Organizing a clothing or toiletry drive in your office, church, community center or neighborhood is an easy way to provide assistance to our guests. Please click here to our wish list.

Donate! — donate online!

• With a $25 donation, you will provide the food for a healthy, homemade breakfast for 25 homeless men and women.
• With a $50 donation, you will provide transportation to doctor appointments and job interviews to 40 homeless men and women.
• With a $100 donation, you will provide art supplies for our Miriam’s Studio’s Art Therapy class.
• With a $500 donation, you will provide one day of case management services to 80 of our guests.
• With a $1,000 donation, you will provide a healthy, homemade meal (breakfast or dinner) to all of our guests for one day!
• With a $2,500 donation, you will provide healthy meals and comprehensive case management services to all of our guests for one morning!
• With a $12,500 donation, you will provide a week’s worth of meals and services to nearly 1,000 homeless men and women.

Donate online!

I few weeks ago, Mark Harrison, CEO of Abraham Harrison, took part in a think tank in Casekow, Germany, at the Corpus Operis castle.  The subject of Mark’s talk was how Abraham Harrison recruits, manages, and maintains a staff of over 40 within the loose confines of a completely distributed, global, virtual client services company.  Mark McMillan wrote this very insightful piece about Mark’s contribution to the conference over at the Talent Function blog: Virtual Admiration – Abraham&Harrison (A model for global workforce). (Via Marketing Conversation)

This week at Corpus Operis in Casekow, Germany, I had the pleasure of meeting Mark Harrison, the CEO of Abraham&Harrison (“A&H”). A&H is a global social media marketing and public relations company [see the framed video below for a pleasurable description of what they do]. The company has a workforce of approximately 35 people operating in 5 continents, 12 countries, in 11 languages, and on 1 Internet. The A&H workforce are predominantly independent contractors, completely virtual, and global. This emerging workforce model is not uncommon, many aspire to build a business like this, but it is unusual to find someone actually doing it. So, let’s hold Abraham&Harrison up to the sun and see what we can learn.

Mark runs the business from his endless summer lairs in Mauritius, an island off the coast of India, and Berlin, Germany. He runs the company with one of his best friends, Chris Abraham who operates from Washington, DC. The business is three years old and has an international client list full of names that you would recognize.

Since the beginning Mark and Chris have consciously shaped a company culture to sustain the business lifestyle that they want. Mark was taking a well-earned sabbatical in Tanzania. Chris had started a PR company and it had grown past the overwhelm level. He asked Mark if would help him run the business. Mark’s response, “Yes, IF you agree that I am free to live wherever I want. My freedom is what I value most. I’ll do it if we agree to run the company as a virtual company.” And so, the first seed of the A&H workforce culture was planted. Mark and Chris have worked hard, with their team, to establish and embody a culture that delivers results for clients while maintaining the lifestyle that the workforce WANTS. Here are some highlights to the A&H workforce approach:

All Accept that Freedom = Responsibility. With a virtual, contracted workforce, there is inherent freedom. There is no boss watching you. No one can see if you have showered, or if you do your laundry at 2:30 in the afternoon. The “virtual risk” is that workers will not work and that it will take a long time to figure that out. The virtual model requires workers who are self-motivated and who accept responsibility for getting the work done. The virtual risk is mitigated by the inherent pressure of being an independent contractor. Since there is no guarantee of a next project, contractors tend to work very hard. Actually at A&H, contractors tend to work too hard. This is a big concern of Mark’s and he regularly protects his contractors from themselves. There is no notion of a 9 to 5 work day but everyone is grounded in the responsibility for selling and delivering work.

Recruitment via Nepotism. Effective recruiting is particularly essential with a virtual, global workforce. Mark proudly relies on nepotism as a primary recruiting tool, “In our environment, our workers feel great responsibility for the people that they introduce into a project. It reflects on them and that produces a very results-oriented energy.” Leadership by Capacity (not by role). Mark and Chris have deliberately created a culture that emphasizes people’s strengths. Team members are encouraged to take projects and tasks that fit their strengths. At times this means that Mark and Chris step aside and let others lead tasks that typical executives would insist on doing. Since they leverage all cloud-managed business applications, the tasks of the business are available for everyone to see. There is total transparency to the work at hand.

Currency Awareness. The A&H corporate lexicon includes the word “currency” which has a different meaning than monetary value. Currency refers to each person’s set of prioritized value drivers that they want from their work at A&H. For example, someone’s currency might look like:

Team Member 1 = freedom, money, the opportunity to play and create
Team Member 2 = predictable pay, time with kids, no emergencies
Team Member 3 = power, respect, responsibility, trust

Mark and Chris make a point of knowing what is most important to their staff and they talk about it openly. It is a bit like how people throw around the Myers-Briggs identities [INTJ, ENTJ, etc...] to describe themselves. Currency awareness pervades decision making at A&H: how they assign projects, how they schedule meetings, how they communicate with each other, etc… The currency concept provides them with a roadmap to create a sustainable workforce.

Total Communication. We rarely get to see our digital co-workers. They live in our phones and in our computers. And aside from an occasional astronaut quality visage through Skype, we don’t have the opportunity to read body language. And global co-workers work when we are sleeping, or when we are bringing the kids to school. How do you keep everyone on the same page? A&H approach this by putting everything in the digital cloud. All calendars, documents, spreadsheets, project plans, go into the A&H cloud. Everyone can see what everyone is doing, and has done. And, they cultivate a cc / bcc / reply-all culture so there is a forensic record of everything. To make this system work, Mark and Chris make sure that they are very accessible to their teams. The most impressive thing is that they actually have an articulated communication protocol. This approach also presumes that people know how to leverage email-rule functionality so that inboxes don’t become overwhelm boxes.

“No-Emergencies” Culture. If a leader or client has a work style that seems to produce a steady stream of last minute emergency meetings, then it spreads out of control. If it gets enabled consistently, then it becomes a feature of the entire culture. And make no mistake, it erodes the quality. Mark and Chris work hard to mitigate this by embodying and enforcing a no-emergencies culture. At A&H everyone buys into an agreement that meetings are only booked with at least 1-day advanced notice and meetings should never be more than 1 hour. This policy takes discipline and it does require Mark and Chris to push back on clients on a regular basis. Emergencies do come up, but at A&H they almost always real versus personality-driven emergencies.

As you can tell, I am a big fan of A&H and their leadership team. They are living the virtual, global company dream in a real way. The conscious, overt crafting of a culture that provides a holistic lifestyle for its workers is an inspiration. Can large organizations learn from the A&H example? What happens when you design the company to produce engagement?

Months and months ago, the gang from Rosetta Stone tapped me to blog about my constant, middle-age, struggle with learning German.

I had already been — and still am — a Rosetta Stone member, from their original online offering through to their new TOTALe product.  Well, my first post debuted last week (I missed seeing it) on their Language Journey blog and here it is: Failing with Language Classes:

I have been struggling with learning German for years in spite of lots of classes both in Washington, DC, as well as in Berlin, Germany, a city I moved to over Halloween 2007 through Christmas 2008. While I know a lot about the German language I still don’t feel comfortable as a German speaker.

On this blog I will share what I have learned about learning German and what I find works for me. As I move forward over the next several months, I hope to get you as excited as I am about learning German.

My best friend Mark lives in Berlin.  He has been fluent in German since he was 17. While he maintains an entire life speaking German in Berlin, I had never really been interested in participating, it just seemed too difficult. However, the moment Mark and I started a business together, that all changed.  I decided to move to Berlin so that we could spend more time working together on our fledgling company.  So, before leaving my Washington, DC apartment behind I signed up for a German course at a language school.

I ended up taking two courses and spent a happy three hours there every Saturday for eighteen weeks. I didn’t learn much German at all. One of the problems was that all the students spoke English, so speaking German was not necessary.  Another problem was that I never completed the assigned workbook and CD homework for the week. I blamed it on my crushing work load as an entrepreneur but the truth is that I didn’t enjoy sharpening pencils and pressing them into newsprint workbooks.  I always found better things to do. It turned into a downward spiral – I never came prepared for my class because I didn’t enjoy the learning style, so I slowly began to become less and less motivated with getting up and schlepping myself downtown every Saturday morning. Unprepared and full of anxiety and trepidation I headed off to Berlin.

There’s another one that’s up there — the next in the series — Learning German – Round 2 — which I will post in another post!

CEO of Bethesda, Maryland, based Emergent Biosolutions, Fuad El-Hibri, was recently named one of the top 500 most influential Muslims and is featured as one of four Muslims who are living in the United States in 500 Most Influential Muslims: Science and Technology over on Examiner.com National.

500 Most Influential Muslims: Science and Technology

The Prince Alwaleed Bin Talaal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding and The Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre published its first edition in what promises to be an annual series of insight into the movers and shakers of the Muslim world.  Entitled The 500 Most Influential Muslims 2009, the book categorizes Muslims’ influential capacities into 15  categories: scholarly , political,  administrative,  lineage, preachers, women, youth, philanthropy, development, science and technology, arts and culture, Qu’ran reciters, media, radicals, international Islamic networks and issues of the day. As part of an ongoing series each week those receiving mention in North America will be highlighted. This week those who seem to have influence in Science and Technology will be highlighted. In this category, there are four people honored living in the United States.

Mohamad Chakaki is a founding member of Green Muslims, a Washington, D.C. group that seeks to relate sustainable environmental policy to faith. He works on projects in the US and the Middle East.

Fuad El Hibri is the CEO of Emergent BioSolutions, Inc. BioSolutions is a multinational bio-pharmaceutical company that is the sole-holder of the FDA-approved anthrax vaccine. He is also Chairman of the East West Resources Corporation and Chairman and Treasurer of the El Hibri Charitable Foundation.

Dr. Mehmet Oz is a cardiothoracic surgeon recently named one of the sexiest men alive for 2009. A frequent visitor of the Oprah Winfrey show and now host of his own show, he is a professor at Columbia University and leads numerous charities and organizations. He has authored several books on personal health.

Ahmed Zewail is the recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research on femotochemistry. He is the Linus Pauling Professor at the California Institute for Technology and was recently asked to serve at President Obama’s invitation as an adviser to the Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

I have been learning German against my natural proclivity and German-language podcasts and German course podcasts have been really and truly helpful in addition to my weekly class at Goethe-Institut in Washington, DC.  Since I have found so much success — especially with Deutsch – Warum nicht? — I wanted to share my list with you:

Deutsch – Warum nicht? – The course Deutsch – warum nicht?, divided into four parts, tells the story of the journalism student Andreas and his invisible ex. Join the two of them on an adventure and learn German along the way! Each of the four series contains 26 lessons with dialogue, exercises and audios to download. The course covers levels A1 to B1 of the European Framework of Reference for Languages and is geared toward beginners and advanced learners. Deutsch – warum nicht? was produced by Deutsche Welle and the Goethe Institute.

MyGermanClass.com video podcast Podcasts – Explore the MyGermanClass Video Podcasts, with creator Clark Shah-Nelson

Learn to speak German with this Free Podcast – Learn to speak German, to read German and to understand German with this free Podcast from Germany and Switzerland.

Goethe-Institut Podcasts – Every few weeks, a new edition of the Goethe-Institut podcast introduces highlights and background information on the music programme of the Goethe-Institutes worldwide. Each edition of this podcast is available free-of-charge and works just like a short radio show. The podcast is also available on subscription and has been optimised for flexible enjoyment on your personal mobile device (e.g. mp3 player).

Slowly spoken news reports – Every day, you can find the newscast from Deutsche Welle’s German Service here – slowly read and clearly articulated just for German learners.

Sprachbar – “Sprachbar” is an offering that introduces you to the subtleties and secrets of the German language.

Top-Thema mit Vokabeln – Catch up on news and learn German at the same time. DW-WORLD.DE offers you up-to-date reports that are easy to understand. The reports are supplemented with vocabulary lists.

Alltagsdeutsch – This podcast features fun and quirky radio reports about life in Germany. The audio files are complemented by manuscripts.

Stichwort – Stichwort is an entertaining program about the latest buzzwords in German.

MyDailyPhrase German – Learn German step by step, day by day, phrase by phrase. In today’s show you’ll learn to say it’s been nice to meet someone.

Geld – Liebe – Hass – Follow the nail-biting trials and tribulations of the family Feinberg, as they help you learn German!

Perspektiven – Perspektiven with Minka and Markus is geared towards first semester college-level German learners looking for a fun and exciting way to practice their German. Learn German through Minka and Markus’ various discussions, interviews and entertaining conversations without the textbook format traditionally used in class!

Das treffende Wort – Join Käthe and Manfred for informal lessons on the German language and culture! This show is geared for intermediate learners of German.

Alles Österreich – Join Anton “ze Austrian”–alias Anton der Österreicher–as he explores Austrian culture, politics, history, and society.

Andere Länder — Anderes Deutsch – This podcast uses unique situations and dialogue to introduce advanced students of German to the Swiss and Austrian national varieties of the German language. Drop in and listen as Birgit from Hannover and Gregor from Graz encounter the distinct standard German varieties of Austria and Switzerland!

Slow German – Brush up your German with Annik!

The lovely Lindsey Mastis called me today, asking me if I would drive up to the headquarters of WUSA Channel 9: 4100 Wisconsin Avenue, NW, to make a statement and give some advice about yesterday’s Gmail outage, including my company’s worldwide use of Google Apps Premiere.  I donned my monkey suit and shot up there and got to record a segment that ended up being called How To Survive A Google Outage:

WASHINGTON, DC (WUSA) — On Thursday morning at 10:30, Gmail went down. For those who rely on Google solely, work came to a halt.

But Technology Strategist Chris Abraham knew what to do.

He backs up everything.

“Have another copy in another place then you can continue working,” he said.

Abraham suggests forwarding a copy of all your e-mails to another account, like Yahoo or HotMail.

When it comes to documents stored on Google, Abraham says save a copy on your hard drive every week.

“Google also allows you to download all your contacts as either an outlook export, or as a CSV file– which is a type of data file,” he said.

There are dozens of programs online to help people and business backup their data. And you can do this for free.

Google even has a site called Apps Status Dashboard with the latest outage updates and ways to get around programs with problems.

Abraham says the only reason his company could continue to work during the outage, is because he created a backup plan ahead of time.

Segment Featured on Main Page of WUSA9

Manhattan Skyline from Long Island City Queens, originally uploaded by Chris Abraham.

I few months ago my lovely friend Sarah Obraitis offered up her mum’s flat in Long Island City in Queens to me for a couple weeks in order to meet with clients, to make Internet Week and get out of Washington, DC, for a while. I must say that I got used to this skyline, mid-town Manhattan to the right then down towards lower-Manhattan, to the left. Forgive the couple ropes that are dangling down, they’re there for the window-cleaners. Aside from that, quite an amazing vista!

Since the inception of Abraham Harrison LLC, we have been focused on blogger relations and blogger outreach.  Social media is our bread and butter, not just something we tacked on.  Over the last several years, we have prospected over 40,000 bloggers across a wide-variety of topics (see below) and over a growing number of languages, including Spanish-speaking, Portuguese-speaking, and Russian-speaking blogs wordwide.

Please scroll down and explore some of the blogger-types we have collected and engage on a daily-basis.  Of course, when a client needs something new — such as our upcoming engagement with Russian and Polish bloggers — we’re very efficient and experienced in researching, locating, and harvesting the most appropriate bloggers. (Via Abraham Harrison and Marketing Conversation)

• A-list Bloggers
• Academic Bloggers
• Activist Bloggers
• Africa Bloggers
• African-American Bloggers
• Alumni Bloggers
• Animal Bloggers
• Anti-Facebook Bloggers
• Asia English Speaking Bloggers
• Baseball Bloggers
• Big Brothers/Sisters Bloggers
• Cancer Survivor’s Bloggers
• College Students Bloggers
• Colorado Bloggers
• Combined Top & Marketing Bloggers
• Contest Aggregation Bloggers
• Corporate Social Responsibility Bloggers
• Craigslist/Online Auction Bloggers
• Daddy Bloggers
• Deaf Community Bloggers
• Democrats Bloggers
• eBay User Bloggers
• Education Bloggers
• Environmental Bloggers
• Ex-Patriate Bloggers
• ExPatriate Health Insurance Bloggers
• Food Bloggers
• Foster Family / Adoption Bloggers
• General Political Bloggers
• Grandparents Bloggers
• Green Bloggers
• Health Bloggers
• Hearing Impaired
• Illinois Bloggers
• India (english speaking) Bloggers
• Investment Bloggers
• Job Seeker Bloggers
• Lawyer Blogs / Blawgs and Blawgers
• Liberal Bloggers
• Marketing Bloggers
• Military Bloggers
• Moderate Bloggers
• Mommy Bloggers
• New Education Bloggers
• New Mexico Bloggers
• Newest Marketing Bloggers
• NY Area Bloggers
• Ohio Bloggers
• Online Dating Bloggers
• Pennsylvania Bloggers
• Photography Bloggers
• Portuguese Speaking College Bloggers
• Portuguese Speaking Daddy Bloggers
• Portuguese Speaking Job Seekers Bloggers
• Portuguese Speaking Mommy Bloggers
• Portuguese Speaking Real Estate Bloggers
• Portuguese Speaking Saving Money Bloggers
• Portuguese Speaking Tech Bloggers
• Real Estate Bloggers
• Real Estate Brokers /NYC Bloggers – TriState Area
• Rebate and Coupon Sites Bloggers
• Recent College Grads Bloggers
• Reconnectors Bloggers
• Running/Jogging/Marathon Bloggers
• Russian Mommy Bloggers
• Russian Tech Bloggers
• Saving Money Bloggers
• Social Networks Bloggers
• Spanish Language Job Seeker Bloggers
• Spanish Language Saving Money Bloggers
• Spanish Language Speaking College Bloggers
• Spanish Language Speaking Mommy Bloggers
• Spanish Language Speaking Real Estate Bloggers
• Spanish Language Speaking Tech Bloggers
• Spirituality Bloggers
• Sustainers Bloggers
• Tech Bloggers
• Teen Lifestyle Influencers/Teen Bloggers
• Top Blog Bloggers
• Top Environmental Bloggers
• Top Liberal Bloggers
• USA: North-East State Bloggers
• Video Sharing Sites Bloggers
• Washington DC Bloggers
• Women’s Lifestyle Bloggers
• Women’s Self Help Bloggers
• World Food Day Bloggers
• Yoga/Soccer/Martial Arts & Sports Nutrition Bloggers
• Young Volunteer Bloggers

I really must brag so please forgive me.  My firm, Abraham Harrison, just got an amazing shout out from What About Clients? WAC is one of the top Blawgs on the planet, captained by Mr. Dan Hull, a king among men. This is the most amazing testimonial we have received and I cannot prevent myself from sharing it:

Got Marketing? Really?

Marketing is different from–and critical to–”making a sale”. Like television and radio, the world wide web has mostly “bad”, or mediocre, sites and advice on the subject. Lots of digital snake oil salesmen, new age know-it-alls, and semi-employed “experts” who’ve never heard a shot fired in anger. But the Internet still has a few stars, early adventurers, and doers that do make it worth swimming through the trash while the Net gets its sea legs.

If you are serious about internet marketing, see Chris Abraham’s The Marketing Conversation. We know Chris, and his partner Mark Harrison, well. We have profited from our relationship on a nearly daily basis since February 2004. They “get”, and making a living, using the Internet to influence in creative, ethical and successful ways. See Abraham & Harrison, based in Berlin, Germany and Washington, D.C.

Twenty-two employees in five countries, and all working hard. Did they ask us for this post? Answer: No. We rarely promote anyone, especially if we are asked. But we do love quality.

I received an invitation from Corbett Santana to attend what sounds like a super-cool inauguration party — if you happen to be celebrating in Berlin, Germany!  I will be in DC for the inauguration but I thought I would pass this on.

Barack Obama Inaugration Celebration/Party in GOYA
Goya, Nollendorfplaz 5 in Berlin
January 20th 2009
Come celebrate with “US”
LIVE from Washington D.C. on BIG screen!
The Inauguration Ceremony of BARACK OBAMA.

• 16:30 Doors open and we will project the entire Ceremony on a large screen in GOYA.
• 16:00 The ceremony starts at and ends at 20:00 (according to a press release from Washington D.C.)
• 20:00 Guest speakers from the different American abroad organizations. There is the POSSIBILITY the Governor Mayor of Berlin will make an appearance. THIS IS NOT CONFIRMED AT THE MOMENT!
• 21:00 Live Music from FOLKADELIC who played at the BABYLON Theater Election Party
• 22:30 DJ “Daddy-O” after playing Funky Soul Classics.

Tickets:  10-,€ & 6-,€ after 21:00
To reserve a ticket send a message to chair@demsinberlin.de
This is a by-partisan event all are welcomed!
There will be an after party at SURPRISE Club & Disco for those of you who find GOYA too expensive & stuffy. A shuttle vehicle will be available to transport you door to door from 22:00 till 12:00. Entrance and shuttle ride is free when you have a ticket for the Event in GOYA.

Fresh off the wire and directly from the Supreme Court, Via the Chicago Tribune:

“The Supreme Court says individuals have a right to own guns, and so has struck down a handgun ban in Washington, D.C.”

“Chicago’s handgun ban has lasted for more than a quarter-century, but it’s under threat after the Supreme Court on Thursday decided that Washington D.C.’s law against handgun ownership is unconstitutional.”