Thanks to XKCD for getting it right in one — this is surely enough reason to make the switch from Facebook to the new Google+ social network at plus.google.com

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

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

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

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

Via Abraham Harrison LLC

My CEO and best friend, Mark Harrison, has been working on a short film for months. An animated short that would explain what we at Abraham Harrison do every day for our clients, worldwide.  I got the finished product this AM and finally have a little time to share it with you.  What do you think?  Please let me know in the comments.

Here’s the full script from the Abraham Harrison – What We Do film

In a world with hundreds of TV channels, thousands of publications online and off, and millions of voices and other distractions vying for people’s attention, we know how hard it can be to get heard by the people you want to reach.

Abraham Harrison can change all that for you. Among the world’s 6 billion people, we can find the hundreds and even thousands of online opinion-leaders who are influencing and driving the decisions of your potential customers and constituencies every day. We find those of them who would naturally love to carry your message out to their communities with their endorsement, and make it very, very easy for them to spread the word about you.

We already operate on 5 continents and speak 12 languages natively. We speak to the world’s online influencers in their languages and in their cultures.

And one of the most powerful things about what we do is that even when we stop talking to the influencers for you, they keep talking to their communities about you. And even when they stop actively carrying your message, because what they’ve written about you is now a permanent part of the internet, your message continues to be carried out, more or less forever, to all those people you want to be thinking of you.

And we don’t only drive your message through the people who influence your potential customers online, we also take it to themachines that influence the people you need to reach.

Google and the other search engines know and respect these online influencers, because they are real people, writing real things, with real human audiences. That’s exactly what the search engines like to rate highly in the results. When exactly these respected online influencers write about you, your message appears in their writings all over the search results.

And as a nice added benefit, when these well-regarded influencers are writing about you, they are linking back to your site, lending their credibility in the eyes of the search engine to your site, which powerfully, and naturally strengthens your ranking in the search results.

In our big world, there are certainly thousands, and perhaps millions of people who want exactly what you are offering – at Abraham Harrison, we’ll help you find them, connect with them, and make them your happy customers.

We’re Abraham Harrison. Connecting you to the world’s influencers.

Q: Why has blogging become so popular with some community associations and organizations?

My A: Blogging is popular for several reasons.  Most companies started blogging when they became entangled in an online controversy or had someone bad-mouth them or offer mis- or dis-information online and the company just did not have any way to engage in that controversy and correct that particular attack.

They were the dumb companies but they’re learning.  The smarted companies realized that their web sites were too thin on content and personality and that commenting in message boards and on blogs — or in traditional press releases that nobody reads any more — is neither effective or worthwhile.  What companies and organizations need to do is to get down from the dais and speak more intimately and more textually and more long-form that one can in the well-sculpted and over-edited (controlled).

There is a lot of work that needs to be resourced for a blog.  It should be updated with both “ever green” content that will always be useful as well as some focus on what’s going on, the company’s processes, and more casual and business-related things.

There are another two reasons to blog: reputation promotion and reputation protection; however, sometimes — like any insurance policy — you may never receive double indemnity on the premiums you have been paying into blog-writing by ever having to go through the ordeal of “accidental death” — but you will realize many valuable gains anyway — and the benefits are two-way.

You will surely benefit from search engine benefits on Google, for one.  You will build a two-way relationship with your community and customers even if that back and forth isn’t 50-50 but rather 90-10. You will add to the confidence and reputation of anyone who blogs for the company, helping them with their personal brand.

Your blog will become a go-to place for expertise and your employees and your organization will better be associated with smarts and insight.

And, in terms of reputation, you will fortify your gates and moats and get your villagers AKA your community AKA your consumers AKA your customers safely on your side so that if you are ever truly attacked with great abandon my an online Internet rogue you will be not only kept above water in the search results but you will also be actively and fiercely defended by the people who have had amazing experiences with you in the past.

(Awesome questions from Madelaine Paterson — more to follow)

Our very own Jonathan Trenn was recently interviewed at part of the PBS MediaShift blog article, How PR People Can Tactfully Locate, Pitch Influential Bloggers, which you should go check out. (Via Marketing Conversation)

Jonathan Trenn, a consultant for Abraham Harrison, a digital marketing company in the DC area, said that if he’s starting from scratch with a client he’ll use free tools like blog search engine Technorati to locate the bloggers he wants to contact. Specifically, he searches for the tags that the bloggers use with their posts, because this is an indicator of whether the person writes regularly on a particular subject.

“It’ll give you a list of blogs to look at,” he told me. “You basically start clicking through, and it’s essential that you read the blog and get to know it a bit, maybe start categorizing it or put it in a database. But essentially you want to get to know what they are about, see if they’re updated frequently.”

Technorati and other search tools allow him to then rank the blogs by authority. He said he begins with focusing on the most influential blogs. But he hastened to add that this is only a starting point, and that he can then begin clicking through these blogs’ blogrolls or even approach the bloggers directly to ask them for more recommendations.

“Late last year I was doing some work with a company called ooVoo,” he said. “They’re a competitor to Skype, only they use video. They can have six screens at once…We came up with the idea of having a ‘political day.’ We reached out to prominent political bloggers to essentially hold their own chats for a day, or a series of days. With that I wanted to make it diverse, from political philosophy to demographic, so I reached out to different types of blogs. I asked them who else I should contact. We had 15 to 18 bloggers — left, center, right, African American, Latino, what have you — and they each had their own sessions.”

Abraham Harrison. LLC: True experts in online PR, not just old-media PR doing an add-on
There is a misconception among many old-media PR shops that online PR is pretty much like the old-school stuff, just in a different place. This could not be further from the truth. New media online PR is a very different world, a totally different culture, and an entirely different approach. It’s not easy, and there are lots of potential pitfalls, but it is extremely effective when done correctly and with enough commitment.

Results by True Online Experts
We’re completely confident in our ability to produce results with clients who are willing to commit the resources and focus to online efforts – we know our way around this space like few others. We also know that there is far more to being a surgeon than reading how an operation is done, far more to being an engineer than having the blueprints in your hands, far more to being a chef than being able to read a cookbook. That is why we are willing to give away the shop in this proposal, and willing to provide even more detail to anyone who asks for it – indeed, we publish all this openly on our website.

Securing you Trust, Endorsements, Top Search Results Ranking, and Ubiquitous Presence of Message
We can get your brand out in front of the world, right in front of the eyes of exactly the people you want to reach. We can drive your search engine and general online visibility so that your brand is ubiquitous in the places where your potential clients live online and at the tops of search results – not only having your brand promoted on your own sites, but getting them endorsed and promoted on the sites and under the names of the influencers in the online worlds where your customers are waiting for you to meet them.

We’re happy to help you connect to the online influencers who are speaking to the communities you’d like to reach, and whose posts will further bolster SEO and the presence of your brand in the search results.

Mark Harrison, CEO & Chris Abraham, President and COO, Abraham Harrison, LLC Via Abraham Harrison

How to Defend and Protect Your Brand Reputation Online

Hear Chris Abraham of Abraham Harrison LLC and Jay Jaffe of Jaffe Associates about how to look after your online reputation and why it is important to do so.

As the saying goes, your good name is everything.  Every individual, and brand, needs to know what their online reputation is and how to protect it. When your online reputation is in disrepair, whether because of bad behavior on your, or your brand’s, part, or because of intentional attacks by competitors or someone with a grudge, you sometimes have legal recourse.  But you always have tactics you can undertake online to protect your reputation.

Find out how to determine what your online reputation already is, how to promote and maintain a good reputation, and how to protect and defend it in the future.  We’ll cover issues like:

• What are people saying about me online?  And Why Should I Care?
• Crisis Management
• Proactive Steps to Defend Against Future Attacks
• How to activate Google and other search engines in your favor

and more.

Speakers

Jay Jaffe of Jaffe Associates
Jay Jaffe is CEO of Jaffe Associates (www.jaffeassociates.com), the leading public relations firm serving law firms in North  America and Europe. Working only in the legal industry, Jaffe offers a broad range of classic PR and PR 2.0 services, crisis communications, strategic marketing consulting, creative branding, and web/technology services. Our goal is to ‘Make It Happen’ for our clients with efficient implementation that goes far beyond goal-setting, strategy and planning.

Chris Abraham of Abraham Harrison LLC
Chris Abraham, President and COO of Abraham Harrison, is a leading expert in online public relations with a focus on blogger outreach, blogger engagement, and Internet reputation management. Chris is a pioneer in online social networks and an Internet analyst, web strategy consultant and advisor to the industries’ leading firms.

This webinar took place live on Thursday May 7th at 1 PM EST and 10AM PST. It will include audience participation and a live question and answer session

In support of my series, 99 Cent Articles, I have been exploring the quality and insight of the inexpensive content market, beginning with 99CentArticles.com — I dropped $100 on 20 articles (actually $92, but $100 sounds better) and I have been sharing them, over time, with you.  I would love to get your feedback on what you think about them and what you would use articles of this quality and consistency for.  This post is based on a series of articles I ordered with on the theme of How Businesses Use X where X is a topic:

How Businesses Use YouTube to Promote Their Brand

YouTube is a video sharing website where you can upload, view and share videos. YouTube has become one of the most important aspects of the internet culture. Because of this, businessmen have used it as an alternative medium to promote their goods or services. The visibility of YouTube in the online community is how businesses use YouTube to promote their brand.

If you are about to launch your business and is looking for a more cost efficient way of advertising, then you should look into having it promoted on YouTube. Millions of people visit YouTube everyday, and getting some part of that millions of viewers to get to check out your video is enough to generate buzz for your business. To help you get started, here is how businesses use YouTube to promote their brand:

• Create your own channel and upload your best videos. Upload only videos that you feel will standout from millions of uploaded videos similar to yours. An interesting video is enough to boost viewership.
• Start a conversation around your videos via YouTube’s Bulletin Board. The more response you get the better it will be for your business. Do not limit yourself to your own bulletin board, though. Being highly visible on this video-sharing community is how businesses use YouTube to promote their brand.
• YouTube is not only a video-sharing site but a social network as well. Add friends and mingle with them. This will generate loyal followers for your business. And if you leave a good impression on them, they will start telling their friends about your channel and your business.
• Search for videos that are related to yours and post one of your videos as a response. Take advantage of the views that other videos get. How businesses use YouTube to promote their brand is like how public relations practitioners would choose the right places to advertise.
• YouTube allows you to fill out a profile. Make your profile as informative as possible. Include a link to your website to generate traffic. In setting up your videos, be sure that all of them are linked to your profile. So when people click on your video, they will automatically go to your profile and from your profile they can click on the link to your website.
• Create playlists of related videos where you can include a lot of popular ones and your own. This will create a greater recall for your brand. Then join groups or start your own, and post both text and video comments. Encourage viewers to subscribe to your channel by asking viewers to subscribe at the end of each video. Reach out to as many audiences as possible.

Knowing how to take advantage of the technology available in YouTube and its popularity will greatly help you in promoting your brand. The possibility of getting your business known to millions of potential new clients is too great a chance to pass up. With a little work and internet savvy, you can save a lot on your advertising expenses.

How Businesses Use Search Engine Optimization to Promote their Brand

The internet has opened a whole new world out there. It is becoming less and less virtual every day. People use the internet to socialize and work. Because of these, search engine marketing has become an aggressive business. Directing quality traffic to their website is how businesses use search engine optimization to promote their brand.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO helps level the playing field for small businesses. Its affordability and accessibility has made it an excellent marketing strategy for them. SEO considers how search engines would rank your website and what users search for. The idea is to have your website appear on the first page of the search results list to lead more visitors to your site. This idea is how businesses use search engine optimization to promote their brand.

How businesses use search engine optimization to promote their brand is not as easy as it may sound. It may take up to six months before results can be seen and you may need to hire a professional to have successful search engine marketing for your product. Remember that you are competing against increasing numbers of documents from various media, blogs and websites along with more savvy search marketers. Therefore, effective SEO requires creative link building, creation of unique content, integration with other online/offline marketing, social media and optimization refinements.

There are still many ways on how businesses use search engine optimization to promote their brand, if hiring a professional search engine marketer is not in your budget. Register your site with directories like Yahoo and Google, this will have more high quality and high trafficked sites pointing to your site.

To help visitors and search engine spiders navigate your site easily, make sure that it is well-organized, utilize a site map if possible. Familiarize yourself with meta tags, these are hidden HTML directions for web browsers or search engines. Creating a meta tag that accurately describe your site content is essential in directing traffic to your website. Take into consideration likely words or phrases that users might type into search engines to find your site. Include these key words or phrases in the title portions of your site and in its relevant content.

To successfully use SEO to market your brand, you have to determine the ideals and goals that your company wants to pursue. Determine your market by searching volume across major engines for key terms associated with your brand. Find out what markets will return the highest result for your product and focus your optimization efforts towards those markets. Seek out non-reciprocal link relationships that are relevant to your site, make sure that it is high enough in influence to create a positive impact on your site. Most important factor in SEO marketing is your website content. It should contain unique and relevant information to sustain interests of customers.

SEO marketing is a great way to launch brand, product or services of small business owners. Considering the time people spend online and the how people have grown to rely on the internet for information, SEO marketing has changed advertising practices of today.

How Businesses Use Twitter to Promote Their Product

Since Twitter is a social networking site with micro blogging as its primary purpose, businesses can use Twitter to promote their products. Since it is a social networking site, it has the potential to bring in more clients. Here are a few tips on how businesses use Twitter to promote their product.

1. Use keywords when setting up an account. Use keywords in filling up the biography section. Use keywords that are broad enough to describe the product and is popular enough that users will use the keywords in their search.
2. Get into discussions. As an expert in your product you can offer advice and answer questions concerning topics involving what you are promoting. People will then notice you and gain confidence in you and eventually do business with you.
3. Keep track of your tweets. Use search engines to look for tweets that may involve you and may contain feedback on your product and address concerns anyone may have on you or your business.
4. Be diligent in making tweets. Set up a time when you are not busy and dedicate that time for the business. This is for people to get used when they can reach you regularly.
5. Add a personal element in your account and your tweets. This will create a more welcoming effect and not a robot like impression on you by potential clients.
6. Start discussions. Ask some of your concerns and receive feedback and criticism. This way, you can find out what is lacking in your business and what needs improvement or if there is anything that people want that you might be able to give a solution to.
7. Since tweets can only contain 140 characters, it is important that your message be concise and informative. The reader of your tweets should not be scratching their heads after they read your tweets. It is also important that you connect with them by making it a bit more personal.
8. Use retweet every possible time. Retweeting makes other people’s tweets to be posted again on your page. This shows that you’re not only concerned with your business but also with what anyone thinks about it.
9. Make multiple accounts. Since different people like different things, create tweeter accounts that will cater to those kinds of needs. Do not flood your tweeter account with different kinds of products. Group them and divide them so that interest would be concentrated to those products. Just make sure that you can keep up with the demands of having multiple tweeter accounts.
10. There are certain software or services that will allow you to search for specific keywords that will help you in looking for discussions where you can join and promote your product. Or even look for discussions that mentions your account name. This way you can track what people are talking about you.
11. Personalize your tweeter web page. Personalize your background add-ons. Make sure your site will be attractive to visitors and potential buyers.

These ideas on how businesses use Twitter to promote their product can help those who want to start a business or have already started a business and want to extend their network and clientele.

How Businesses Use Facebook to Promote Their Brand

Social networking has increasingly become part of our daily lives. Rarely a day goes by without checking in to see what’s happening to our friends, virtual or not. We now have to the tendency to announce on these social networking sites important things that are happening to us. Facebook is one of the most popular of these sites. And because of its popularity, people are using it to freely advertise their businesses. Creating their own Facebook account is how businesses use Facebook to promote their brand.

How businesses use Facebook to promote their brand is uncomplicated. Once you have created an account and worked on the content of your business profile, you simply click on the “Advertising” link. Then click on the “Pages” link and it will lead you to Facebook Pages page. Clink the button that says “Create a Page”. It will ask you to select the type of business, enter the name, and just follow whatever you’re prompted to do. Be sure to upload all necessary information that will identify your business, like the logo, contact information, other web address that you may have, etc. Lastly to activate your page, just clink on “Publish”. You may also need to post it on the wall of your personal profile for your friends to see or send invites to your friends to become a fan of your new business page. Eventually, a link named “Ads and Pages” will appear and this will allow you to have access on both areas.

Using Facebook or other social networking sites to promote your business is the cheapest way to advertise. All you need is to spare some time each day to update and manage your business page. How businesses use Facebook to promote their brand is a clever and cost efficient way of creating a market to the hundreds of millions of users that lurk on this site every day.

The best feature of your business page is that you can send “Updates” to your fans. If you have a new product to launch, simply compose an interesting write-up that you can send out to your fans. You can also post link that will directly lead them to a particular part of company website. This is how businesses use Facebook to promote their brand. And it costs comparatively lower than any other forms of online advertising.

Using Facebook as your advertising medium entails a different salesman skill on your part. There are millions of users out there who log in everyday to relax and connect with other people. The opportunity of reaching a multitude of audience for your sales pitch should be managed carefully. Make your business page as arresting as possible. It has to catch their attention. Join groups that are related to your business and mingle with its members. There are tools you can use to broadcast upcoming events or syndicate your blog. Utilize these tools to the fullest. Make your presence felt by being a fan of other business pages, write on their walls or send virtual gifts of appreciation.

Facebook is the leader in social networking. Take advantage of its popularity and ease of use to promote your business.

So, what do you think?

Hear Chris Abraham of Abraham Harrison LLC and Jay Jaffe of Jaffe Associates about how to look after your online reputation and why it is important to do so. Be sure to register now!

As the saying goes, your good name is everything.  Every individual, and brand, needs to know what their online reputation is and how to protect it. When your online reputation is in disrepair, whether because of bad behavior on your, or your brand’s, part, or because of intentional attacks by competitors or someone with a grudge, you sometimes have legal recourse.  But you always have tactics you can undertake online to protect your reputation.

Find out how to determine what your online reputation already is, how to promote and maintain a good reputation, and how to protect and defend it in the future.  We’ll cover issues like:

• What are people saying about me online?  And Why Should I Care?
• Crisis Management
• Proactive Steps to Defend Against Future Attacks
• How to activate Google and other search engines in your favor

and more.

Speakers

Jay Jaffe of Jaffe Associates
Jay Jaffe is CEO of Jaffe Associates (www.jaffeassociates.com), the leading public relations firm serving law firms in North  America and Europe. Working only in the legal industry, Jaffe offers a broad range of classic PR and PR 2.0 services, crisis communications, strategic marketing consulting, creative branding, and web/technology services. Our goal is to ‘Make It Happen’ for our clients with efficient implementation that goes far beyond goal-setting, strategy and planning.

Chris Abraham of Abraham Harrison LLC
Chris Abraham, President and COO of Abraham Harrison, is a leading expert in online public relations with a focus on blogger outreach, blogger engagement, and Internet reputation management. Chris is a pioneer in online social networks and an Internet analyst, web strategy consultant and advisor to the industries’ leading firms.

This webinar will take place live on Thursday May 7th at 1 PM EST and 10AM PST. It will include audience participation and a live question and answer session.