Capabilities

OUR PHILOSOPHY

We believe that many factors play into a successful client/firm relationship:

Delivering value. If a client doesn’t receive an adequate return on its investment, the relationship isn’t working.

Staff background. We pride ourselves on the fact that every member of our staff came to us with experience from the client side so we understand how our clients think and work. We’re also proud that our senior staff have been with us for more than 10 years.

Chemistry. We strive to work well with clients by understanding and adapting to different work environments and styles. And, while we take our work seriously, we like to have fun, too.

LEADERSHIP

Chris Abraham

Chris Abraham, digital strategist, and technologist is a leading expert in digital: search engine optimization (SEO), online relationship management (ORM), Internet privacy, and online public relations with a focus on blogger outreach, blogger engagement, and Internet crisis response.

Dan Krueger

A 20-year media veteran, Dan leads the day-to-day operations of Gerriscorp ensuring the firm's clients benefit from creative, integrated programs that deliver strong, measurable results. Dan specializes in project management, influencer outreach, social media campaigns, and video production.

SERVICE OFFERINGS

INFLUENCER SERVICES

Influencer Marketing

Influencer outreach is a process by which we identify the influencers in your space and activate them on behalf of your brand.  We do two types of influencer outreach: A-List (Tier-1) and Long-Tail (Micro-Influencers). Micro-influencer marketing is one of the services that sets us apart from other Digital PR firms. Most firms focus only on influencer marketing to Tier-1 influencers. While this is effective for getting a lot of eyeballs on the initial post, the story is quickly buried due to the high frequency, fickle nature, of posts.

We focus on reaching the long-tail—the micro-influencers. We contact thousands of online influencers in your target demographic and individually interact with every influencer who expresses interest. This results in from hundreds to thousands of positive posts across a variety of social media and video channels and on blogs and in other publications about your brand resulting in higher SEO in addition to the broad base of brand awareness.

Micro-Influencer Marketing

Reach everyone online who can help your brand succeed. People are engaged online. They're talking about products, services, experiences, and travel; they're sharing their hobbies, hopes, dreams, passions, aspirations, memories, and fascinations, online. Micro-Influencer Marketing is a process by which we identify all the influencers in your space and engage them on behalf of your brand—upwards of one- to eighty-thousand! 

ONLINE REPUTATION SERVICES

Online Reputation Management 

Our Online Reputation Management (ORM) services will help you prepare for a social media crisis before disaster strikes or help you mitigate the damage that a current crisis could be causing.

We identify welcome and unwelcome content appearing in the search results for your name or business, incorporating any feedback or suggestions provided. We collect information from you or other publicly available sources, to be used by our publications team to develop web content. We create new content, to be approved by you or another designated representative. We then strategically publish this new content to the Internet according to a personalized publication plan based on the amount, kind, and strength of unwanted content appearing online. We optimize and reinforce the network of content and websites we have created for maximum ranking and promotional power. We will use our websites to push up any preexisting welcome content that you have identified for promotion and build sufficient preventative link strength to protect against new unwelcome content that might potentially be posted in the future.

Digital and Internet Forensics

While the Internet has been plagued with the reputation of being anonymous, the online world is infinitely trackable—if you know how and where to find all the breadcrumbs. Even when complete anonymity is attained, there are always hints, there’s always a context, there’s always timing, and there is also any number of other mistakes that people make—and the longer the anonymity perseveres, the easier it is to put all the pieces together.  Using both mechanical and human solutions, including social engineering and human community infiltration, we can generally follow the spoor until we can not only identify the prey but trap it. When your life is being destroyed by trolls who are doxing you and keeping you up at night with fear for yourself, your family, your children, your livelihood, and even your reputation, it’s important to stop it, either through discovery that can be shared with law enforcement or by bringing the evidence to the public, the press, or to lawyers and judges; or, it can be retaliated to directly, fighting fire with fire.

Social Engineering

Sometimes, even after using all the tools available to remediate attacks, nothing can be done digitally. When all the tools are exhausted, some of the most effective weapons against attack are human. There are all sorts of social engineers, lawyers included. While the law is, indeed, a very powerful and effective form of social engineering, even the threat of legal action, threat, process, and suit, can be enough. Even further, there are strategies of infiltration, catfishing, bait-and-switch, and even methods of misrepresentation and good old-fashioned seduction that can break through even the most impenetrable bulwark that can happen by limiting research and discovery to the Internet-connected computer keyboard.

Memetic Engineering

Reality is just a construct. As we have become painfully aware of, the Internet—and all the communities and networks that make it up—isn’t necessarily reality-based at all. It’s just a collection of noise and signals, the strongest of which can and does break through into the consciousness not only Americans but of people worldwide. There is virtually zero-barrier of entry as to who can engineer the memes that influence business, buying, voting, and personal decisions. The creatives behind PR and advertising are surely memetic engineers of a sort. But the tools are accessible to anyone as the Internet has no editors and any attempt that the online communities have made to exert top-down editing or message and content invariably looks more like censorship than any sort of value-add. Memetic engineers can thrive in the liminal space between mainstream media and speculative imagination. It’s a very powerful space, especially when anything and everything you can do is already being blamed on Putin and the Russian Trolls.

ADA Audit and Remediation

An ADA audit is to reveal the missing pieces in your site that prevents it from being compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requirements for website and web application accessibility. 

If you are a business that exists to benefit the public, a local or state government agency, or are a private employer with 15 or more employees, you should be compliant with the ADA regulations.

It’s not just visual impairments that need to be considered when making your website compliant with the law. Some of the more common website accessibility issues affect individuals with hearing impairments and those who are unable to use a mouse and must navigate with a keyboard, touchscreen, or voice recognition software. For those with hearing impairments, the issue is often that audio content on the website does not include closed captioning, or that images do not include captions. You may need to build your website to properly interact with any adaptive software or technology designed for accessibility purposes.

We identify the ADA issues that your site is deficient in and will give you a proposal to bring it to compliance.

SOCIAL MEDIA SERVICES

Social Media Monitoring

People are already talking about you and your brand. And, once you launch a social media campaign, including advertising, influencer outreach, online engagement, or content marketing, monitoring and accountability are all essential parts of any modern marketing and PR campaign. Even if you’re not interested in sales conversions, it’s essential to be able to see and interpret what the impact of your social media marketing campaign is. Monitoring turns a series of unrelated social media behaviors into more of a science laboratory where you can experiment. Where you can actually see where all the hard work you’re doing with your social media marketing, content marketing, and online PR comes to fruition. You can better audit how actions have reactions and you can do A/B/C testing so that you can optimize all your work to better serve your missions and goals.

Social Media Planning and Calendaring (Strategy)

Even today, social media is often not integrated into the greater corporate strategy. As a result, companies too often make up their social media marketing as they go along, ad hoc, reacting to content and information and updated they get as they get them, tactically instead of strategically. Not unlike any editorial calendar used by magazines and newspapers, planning social media output and engagement over the course of a calendar, month-by-month, allows brands and companies to develop content that recurs annually and develop content that dovetails with all the unique national, state, and local holidays, memorial days, and awareness days. Every day of the year has one or more issues on that day. Imagine what you can do if you had the entire year planned out, awareness days and multicultural holidays and important events in history and even important events in your brand’s history! We can help you develop such a process and strategy that can not only allow you to play the “guess what day it is” game but also, with such a distant horizon, you can really synchronize with your C-suite, your marketing team, your PR team, your Board, and be able to get everything past Legal well before you need to share it.

Social Media Automation

Unlike many things in life, you can run a social media marketing campaign as a bit of a one-man-band. There are so many tools that allow you to automate and semi-automate your social media sharing, response, and engagement. Even if you have an entire marketing team with several people devoted to social media marketing, it’s always worthwhile to outsource all the tedium and busywork that keeps social media marketers from their creativity and from innovating and exploring and doing the kind of social experimentation that might actually result in some real success. For example, just like radio and television are always pausing for the news and for station identification, every social media channel should intersperse your own news and your own business identification (with links and hashtags)—and all of those things can very well be automated. 

Social Media Development

Every social profile starts with zero Likes, subscribers, followers, or friends. Even mature social media sites are often plateaued at under ten-thousand, even under a thousand! This really doesn’t look right, especially when it doesn’t vibe well with the perceived popularity of a brand in real life (IRL). Having too few followers is always more of a red flag than having too many. In a world where even the President of the USA pays for followers, it’s actually pretty essential for brands that are starting up or launching—or still in the doldrums of having fewer-than 500 followers—to buy ten-thousand from a site like FastFollowerz, for example, in order to make sure your brand perception is in line with how many followers you have. Moreover, until you have over 10,000 followers/Like/Subscribers, Twitter and YouTube and Facebook still have their leash on you. Once you attain a level of popularity, even if it’s inorganic, then you’ll have a lot more freedom. It comes down to this: nobody wants to dance in an empty club. And nobody ever checks to see if the talented dancers are locals or if they’re actually models hired from an agency. Other methods include cross-platform promotion, the inclusion of social media sites and every piece or promotional material both online and in real life (letterhead, in stores, in ads, etc). 

Social Media Strategy

If you build it, they probably won’t come. While social media is generally handed tactically and in reaction to what’s happening in the world. While you can’t prepare for everything that could potentially happen in the wilderness of the Internet. Developing a strategy is essential towards making sure that social media speaks in the same tone, at the same pace, and in the same voice as the rest of the company. If you use it as customer support, it should strategize with customer support. If it’s brand promotional, it should work closely with marcom, and if it’s being used as part of the sales channel, the strategy needs to dovetail with sales.  Most social media campaigns are connected closely at the CMO level since their success and failure always seems to be of interest to a company’s Board of Directors. 

Social Media Services/Social Media Management

If you don’t currently have the bandwidth to bring social media in-house or you just want to keep your company light and agile, you may outsource your social media to us.  We’re capable of either embedding with your company or, more simply, work with you remotely via Skype and conference calls. While we can and do, most often, work remotely, we pride ourselves on being able to integrate very closely with your company and work seamlessly on your behalf. If you require in-person briefings, trainings, and coaching we can easily schedule. We as a team, either embedded in-house or remote, are able to take over and perform any and all of the offerings we offer on your behalf, as you. In addition, we’re also happy and able to pursue the hybrid approach where we fill out your current team in order to offer more bandwidth as well as take some of the pressure off, add capabilities, and also cover a much broader swath of the 24/7 business and news cycle.

Social Media Training/Social Media Coaching

We’re able to help you with both. While we offer social media marketing services and management services as well as hybrid you/us solutions, we also are more than willing to coach you. We have two methods: apprenticeship and pedagogy. With the apprenticeship model, we teach you as we do. We do the client service work on your behalf while going from shadowing us to assisting us in working with us to leading us to leaving us. Once you leave the nest, our job is as a consigliere, consultant, mentor, or sage. The pedagogy method means that we will develop bespoke training modules for your team or one-to-one coaching and personal training where we work as personal tutors. This can last as long as it is needed or until mastery. We’re happy to adapt our teaching to you and it can happen on-site or remotely

Social Media Marketing/Social Media Promotion

Social media marketing (SMM) isn’t just one thing. While some believe that social media should only be a platform for the engagement of people by brands via people, we in the 80/20 rule (more like 70/30 in the real world).  This means your social media channels are akin to your own personal wire services. While RSS and ATOM syndication is not very commonplace anymore, opt-in subscription newsletters, Twitter, Facebook, and the rest, can be used by your PR department to share just the kind of information that you’d generally plan for all the PR Newswires of the world. While brand, product, and service-promotion should really only be 20%-30% of all the content shared via social media channels, too many companies are afraid of spending any of their time doing shameless self-promotion. It’s OK. If they follow you they already have taken a strong step towards loving you already. Like all networking or social opportunities, it’s essential to make authentic and personal connections; however, networking isn’t about making friends of collecting people, it’s about moving the ball forward. We assist you in all cycles of pitching, selling, engaging, facilitating, supporting, and proving the sort of solutions that drives you forward towards the goal—converting, transitioning, engaging, subscribing, and—ultimately—selling. While social media can and does act in the service of customer relations and customer support, it should also be a place where you can tout your wares. A fanbase, followership, and ultimately converting your screaming fans into loyal paying customers. 

Reddit IAmA Management

The IAmA (as in I am a _____, Ask Me Anything) Community is a place on Reddit where a new kind of crowdsourced interview can happen, which is an Ask Me Anything. There are two levels: IAmAs, scheduled and promoted generally supporting celebrities and notables and AMAs, a general forum for “everyone else.”  

While Reddit IAmAs are conducted on the asynchronous Reddit message boards, it’s treated more like chat. That said, the interviewee should be willing to commit to at least a couple hours through to all day.  The interviewee can go through and reply to the questions they find interesting, and easily see those questions the internet is dying to have the answer too.

Because the internet is asking the questions, they're going to be a mix of serious and lighthearted, and you'll find yourself sharing all kinds of things you won't find in a normal interview.  Embrace the cult of personality. This isn’t a press conference. Reddit doesn’t respond very well to shameless self-promotion. As a result, the topic of the Reddit AMA/IAmA should be as general as possible.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION SERVICES

SEO Automation - most modern content management (CMS) sites support plugins and modules. There are a variety of 3rd party modules that can automatically optimize site content and site images in the background after setting up these plug-ins and integrating them into Google and Bing Webmaster tools, etc. 

Writing for SEO - most traditional copywriters are appalled by how they’re taught to write for search. Luckily, Google’s recently become more interested in user experience and readability; however, Google still only returns pages that literally have the searched-for words on them. So, writing for SEO is a balance between readability and user experience and having all the words and phrases your site needs to have to show up on search literally on the pages of your site. This also includes linking, keywords, etc. 

Writing Copy for Search - Also, writing content for search.  Since Google Search is extremely literal, it’s important that whatever search terms that you want your site to show up for, you need to have both the literal phrase in there and also a cornucopia of similar content. In search, SEO experts spend a lot of time doing keyword research, trying to find the least competitive search terms that would result in their site being found and then write to that; also, people oftentimes will write content based on Google Trends, trying to surf the most currently-successful content to drive traffic to their sites. Writing copy for search is all about creating content that is the most compelling to Google and Bing search so that their sites show up organically on Google under these terms. 

Optimizing Drupal for Search - white database-backed CMS and blog platforms can be like catnip to Google Search based on its architecture and how professional Drupal sites tend to be, Drupal can also be a pig hog of a resource-intensive site. There are so many useful plugins and off-site 3rd party services available, each of which can slow Drupal down. Additionally, server speed, caching, image optimization, and database optimization and responsiveness, can bog down a site where Google won’t be willing to pass visitors off to it. This can really kill search results even if the site is content-optimized for search. In the new search, all parts contribute to where your site shows up organically on search. 

Optimizing Wordpress for Search - Wordpress is one of the easiest database-backed platforms online. Unfortunately, the success of the site directly affects its performance. While you can install Wordpress sites on a $3.95/month web host, it’s not recommended. As a database-backed site, each additional plugin and 3rd party script can slow down a Wordpress site to where Google might be unwilling to rely on it and will lower its placement in the Google rankings. So, even if the copy is on point and the site is architecturally and keyword-optimized with content that passes Google’s muster of readability while still covering all preferred keywords and phrases, you still need to choose the right hosting company, have a server with enough RAM, a fast enough drive (or a quick enough virtual server), close enough to the Internet backbone (tier 1 service), image optimization, adequate caching, and possible integration with a Content Delivery Network (CDN).

Content Delivery Network (CDN) - A content delivery network is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to distribute service spatially relative to end-users to provide high availability and high performance. In addition to investing in better servers, better hosting, better caching, database optimization, image optimization, adding a CDN to the mix can make your site show up everywhere around the world without any undue delay. It can be a very effective service, especially for new and eCommerce sites. 

Site Speed Optimization - So many companies are willing to pay thousands of dollars on SEO consultants and site developers but are unwilling to spend enough money on making sure their sites are being hosted on a powerful and responsive enough hardware, virtual, or cloud server solution to support not just the site being fast enough for your visitors, readers, or customers, but quick and responsive enough to pass Google’s PageSpeed Insights site speed test. It’s not only the allocated RAM memory or the speed of the hard drive, but it’s also the responsiveness of the database, the site caching, the optimization and minification of images, CSS, HTML, and even JavaScript. There are so many advantages to 2018 Google Search; however, one of them that can be frustrating is that if your site isn’t as responsive as Google Search itself, Google might de-prioritize your listing based solely on that fact and not whether your site offers the best content. Even if your site is perfectly optimized for keywords and architecture and your link strategy is on point, if your site is perceived as too slow or not quick enough, Google will ignore it. I will be so bold as to add mobile and accelerated mobile page (AMP) to optimization via site speed.

CMS SITE MANAGEMENT SERVICES

Content Management Systems 

Experts with blogs and CMS platforms since 1999 include sites on Linux, BSD, and Unix servers. Web applications built using Perl, Python, and PHP with PostgreSQL, MySQL, and ZODB database backends. Currently developing, running, populating, updating, and monitoring. CMS proficiency includes Wordpress, Drupal, Zope, Plone, and Joomla. We have experience installing, monitoring, and building up online forums and message boards and Nukes, including phpBB, Phorum, vBulletin, etc. 

CMS Site installation - While tools like cPanel can install CMS platforms like Drupal and Wordpress into $3.95/month web hosting services with the click of a button, there’s the cheap and easy way and there’s the right way.  As they say, measure twice, cut once. Entertainment Weekly runs Drupal and The New Yorker runs Wordpress. Even though Drupal and Wordpress are free open source CMS solutions that will run on the cheapest hosting site, enterprise solutions should be developed using enterprise hardware, software, caching, bandwidth, database, hosting, and CDN solutions—beginning at birth, at installation.

CMS Site Management - just because you’re the captain of your own ship doesn’t mean there isn’t an engine room full of sweaty engineers and mechanics. Yes, you can solo sail a small boat—even around the world. Anything bigger than a 35-foot sailboat and you’re going to need help. It’s important, after building and optimizing your site, you’re going to need to hire or retain an engineer or expert who can keep your site running like a top. Databases become slowly corrupted, hardware and software need to be optimized, domain names and nameservers need to be maintained, updated, and renewed.  From hardware to software to the healthiness of the pipe connecting your site to the Internet, need to be constantly gardened.

CMS Site Security - Sites can be vulnerable from the very front end through issues with templates, JavaScripts, to vulnerabilities in PHP at the server-side scripting language-level to the PostgreSQL and MySQL database back-end to the Apache, IIS, Lighttpd, etc, web server, all the way back to the OS, DNS, etc. Making sure all the holes are prevented and patched is essential.

CMS Site Updates - Updating your CMS, all the plugins and modules, and all your back-end services, including PHP, MySQL, BSD/Linux, isn’t rocket science; however, you would be surprised to see how many Wordpress and Drupal sites are months if not years behind in their site security and compatibility updates. You don’t ever want to be the one caught with your pants down when it comes to site security and vulnerabilities. 

CMS Site Analytics - Google Analytics and Bing/Google Webmaster Tools take a second to learn and a lifetime to master. From setting up and connecting your site to Google’s and Bing’s tools to integrating them, adding 3rd party analysis and reporting tools as well as dashboards and campaign tools, we’re more than happy to set everything up for you, including helping you with advertising and keyword services. We can even write reports for you and your boss and your board. 

CMS Site Monitoring - From simply making sure that your site is always up, to making sure your site is running on all cylinders, we can set everything up for you and you can do all the monitoring—or we can do it for you. We can even write reports for you and your boss and your board. 

ADDITIONAL SERVICES

Wikipedia Editing Services 

Everyone deserves to participate in how they're represented on Wikipedia we can help you curate and manage your personal, professional, or corporate reputation on Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Content Marketing 

We blog on AdAge, Huffington Post, Rosetta Stone Blog, Business2Community, Yahoo Business, Biznology, The Social Media Monthly, Social Media Monthly, and many others. 

CASE STUDIES

Skinny & Co. Coconut Oil Case Study

CHALLENGE: Skinny & Co. was missing out on the global health stampede in search of the best all-purpose coconut oil. While their product is wild harvested, hand-pressed, small batched, never heated, 100 percent pure, 100 percent virgin, and 100 percent chemical- and solvent-free, their market was niche and they were losing out to much bigger brands offering mass quantities of sub-par consumer-grade coconut oil.

SOLUTION: We reached out to a wide assortment of Fitness & Health, Lifestyle, Parenting, Beauty, and Yoga influencers over three months, 1,300 bloggers on month one, 1,400 on month two, and 1,500 on month three. Each influencer was offered a “blogger gift basket” which included a broad sample of Skinny coconut oil-based product unless they asked for something more specific, such as a 16 oz bottle of coconut oil for cooking for cooks and chefs who would prefer cooking oil to beauty products, for example, or for an especially élite Tier-1 influencer.

Our publicity team engaged each and every influencer by hand, making sure they were provided with everything they needed. After which, our team facilitated each and every one of the 712 respondents over the course of the three-month campaign. 

RESULTS: Over the course of the campaign, we reached out to 4000+ blogger/influencers in demographics ranging from Fitness & Health, Lifestyle, Parenting, Yoga and more. There were 712 responses (18% response rate) and 434 requests for products to be sent. The outreach campaign generated approximately 500+ posts across blogs, YouTube and social channels.

During the three month campaign, the Skinny Coconut Oil website saw a 76% increase in new users and revenue.

Testimonial:

            "Skinny & Co. is thrilled with the outcome of our 3-month blogger campaign! Working with Chris and Dan was an absolute delight. Their professionalism is unmatched and we were extremely satisfied with the response to their work! Over the course of three months, they contacted thousands of bloggers resulting in 500 posts, YouTube videos, and social media mentions from influencers across the board. This helped increase our audience reach and generate lots of new customers. Plus, everything was timely, well-organized, and easy to understand. I'd highly recommend their services and look forward to working with them again in the future. Thanks so much, Chris and Dan!"
Kaylyn Easton, CMO, Skinny & Co.

Mizuno Mezamashii Run Project Case Study

CHALLENGE: The running shoe category, led by giants Nike and Reebok, spent $144 million in paid media from June 2011 to June 2012. Mizuno was virtually unknown in the U.S., with 7% brand favorability and a $1.5 million marketing budget — just 1% of category spend.

Mizuno’s best prospects, running junkies, stick to what they know works: Eighty percent know the brand and model of running shoe they intend to buy before they shop, and 90% actually do buy that brand and model. We had to be extremely compelling to disrupt that behavior.

But Mizunos are stiff (for a reason) so they don’t feel as cushy and comfortable as the mainstream brands. So trying Mizunos on in the store is far from compelling.

On top of that, Mizunos are priced 35% above the category, including their flagship shoe the Wave Rider, which they had recently redesigned in a way that alienated many within the small group of Mizuno loyalists.

SOLUTION: We took the shoe trial experience out of the store and on the road.

Mizunos are stiff because they are designed for running. Mezamashii is Japanese for brilliant. We put the two together to create the Mezamashii Run Project.

First, key running junkie influencers, from bloggers to running club leaders and celebrities, received 600 handmade, direct mail invitations and a code to order a free pair of shoes at the Mezamashii Run Project site. They were in turn given invitations they could share with fellow runners who they thought would also appreciate a “mezamashii” run. That used up half our budget.

The other half went to paid, owned and earned media to build awareness of the program and offer the overall running public the chance to be among the 100 people chosen to receive a free pair of Mizuno running shoes.

Mezamashii Run Project members continue to get new, relevant and exciting information and offers from Mizuno, like the opportunity to wear-test future products, influence shoe design and access future models before they become available to the public.

RESULTS: In just 60 days, the Mezamashii Run Project accomplished the following:

• Engaged 19,504 Mizuno runners and Mezamashii Run Project members

• Welcomed 100,000 new unique visitors to mizunorunning.com, an increase of 52%

• Brought 155,859 visits to the Mezamashii Run Project home page through paid and earned media

• Gained 25% more Twitter followers

Brand favorability, which was reflected in comments made by Mezamashii Run Project members who rated the shoes they received, grew 54%, from 7% to 10.8%, in the first five weeks of media support.

Of those Mezamashii Run Project members posting reviews, 94% gave top 2 box scores to the shoes and 93% said they intend to buy Mizuno shoes in the future.

Mizuno saw immediate growth in strong specialty store sales and quickly achieved a three-year share high.

Alzheimer's Association Case Study

CHALLENGE: To raise the awareness of a new study issued by the Alzheimer’s Association pertaining to Alzheimer’s disease and the Baby Boomer generation.

The Alzheimer’s Association aims to raise awareness of Alzheimer’s disease, symptoms, and search for a cure.  They conduct and release various studies concerning different aspects of Alzheimer’s disease and its effects.

We were tasked with helping the Alzheimer’s Association raise the online profile of their latest study “Generation Alzheimer’s”.

STRATEGY/TACTICS:  Leverage the influence of bloggers in target demographics (Baby Boomers and medical field) to promote a new study released by the Alzheimer’s Association

We reached out in two campaigns to over 4,000 bloggers covering topics relevant to Baby Boomers and Alzheimer’s.

To better equip each blogger with special content relating to the Alzheimer’s Association and it’s latest study, our created a social media news release including embeddable pictures, videos, banner ads and message copy concerning findings that bloggers could paste into their blogs.

The purpose of the blogger outreach was to earn bloggers’ support and encourage them to act as amplifiers and informants on behalf of the Alzheimer’s Association.

RESULTS:  We secured hundreds of blog posts for the Alzheimer’s Association, resulting in more than 23 million impressions. 

The social media news release we created for the Alzheimer’s Association received over 72,000 views in just over 2 months.  The SMNR is now a permanent part of the online landscape when searching information on Alzheimer’s.

The increase in blogger coverage of Alzheimer’s and the “Generation Alzheimer’s” study resulted in organically boosted Search Engine rankings for the Alzheimer’s Association.

Fresh Air Fund Case Study

CHALLENGE: To help strengthen brand awareness, expand existing Fresh Air Fund community, and increase donations. 

The Fresh Air Fund had virtually no social media presence before we took on the task of designing an integrating social media strategy to strengthen brand awareness, expand existing communities and increase support of the organization. We focused on three goals for the Fresh Air Fund Campaign: recruiting hosts, recruiting counselors, and increasing donations.

STRATEGY/TACTICS: To employ an integrated social media strategy using blogger outreach, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to increase exposure. We launched 11 separate blogger outreach campaigns on behalf of the Fresh Air Fund. Each campaign was introduced with a topic specific social media news release (i.e. hosts, counselors, etc.) to target bloggers who would share the information with their readers. Our blogger outreach strategy also included a number of novel campaigns including a "Thank You" outreach and a dollar for dollar donation match campaign. In addition to blogger outreach, We also helped develop profiles for Fresh Air Fund on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

RESULTS: The Fresh Air Fund drastically increased their brand awareness via online mentions and strengthened its presence in social media. In the days following each blogger outreach campaign, social media monitoring showed consistent spikes in online conversations, with the largest spike occurring as a result of the dollar for dollar outreach. Over the course of a year, we helped drive the number of online mentions about Fresh Air Fund from 4,000 to 65,000 mentions. Our social media efforts garnered approximately 11 million impressions. Their Facebook profile grew from 400 to over 36,000 (today) and their Twitter handle grew from 229 to over 10,000 followers. Their efforts in social media also boosted their Google SEO results in an order of magnitude, making them easier to find and more accessible to parents, counselors, and donors.

Testimonial:

            "Chris Abraham and his team tackled an extremely time-sensitive project for us and got up to speed quickly. We were impressed with their expertise in the industry, the ability to execute a plan successfully and willingness to listen to our needs and goals. Their work has made an impact on our programs already and has given a tremendous boost to our awareness efforts."
Jenny Morgenthau, Executive Director, The Fresh Air Fund

Financial Services Reputation Defense Case Study

Usually, reputation defense is about cleaning negative search results off of Google and Bing; however, in the case of a recent international financial services firm we did work for, we were effectively able to prevent any negative mentions to even take root.

An AP article came out that wrongly accused a financial services firm of laundering drug money. The article hit the wire and was repeated over 600 times online. They reached out to Gerris to do a reputation defense for them. Luckily, they contacted us immediately after the article was published so we were able to completely protect the first 5 pages from any sticky web or blog mention at all.

CHALLENGE: AP article incorrectly implying the company was involved in drug money laundering. The article was picked up and reprinted by 600 newspapers and many many news sites. The client and its CEO had very little to no web presence prior to the articles' viral spread. This resulted in the first 60 pages of search results returning only this negative story.

OBJECTIVE: To regain control of the client’s online reputation and to clear it of this negative and false information.

STRATEGY: To achieve this objective, our team needed to promote the presence of the client in the online realm with a goal of positive and neutral results dominating the first 3 pages of search results.

TACTICS: We launched a large and multi-pronged Online Reputation Management (ORM) campaign. This meant that multiple domains, blogs, and Social Network profiles were created for both the company and the CEO. These sites were then populated with many positive and neutral articles which were then cross-linked and submitted to all of the search engines.

RESULTS: In a matter of 6 weeks the Gerris team had regained control of the identity and image of the client. The negative article no longer dominated the first 3 pages - only a tiny percentage of users read beyond the first 3 pages of results - instead the positive and neutral stories that had been spread around the web by the team dominated the search results.

Survivor Corps Case Study

CHALLENGE: Originally known as the Landmine Survivor Network (LSN), Survivor Corps had outgrown its focus on landmine survivors and was looking to re-brand the organization to focus on all survivors. This rebranding was launched at the same time that one of the founders of LSN, Jerry White, released his book, Getting Up When Life Knocks You Down, which focused on sharing his experience and advice on navigating survivorship.

STRATEGY: The focus was placed on reaching out to those communities that already struggle with issues of survivorship - Military Veterans, Cancer Survivors to name but two. Using the book as a vehicle to promote the overall change in brand and the human interest story of Jerry White played critical roles in our overall strategy.

TACTICS: The campaign focused on Online Outreach, messaging thousands of bloggers and sharing the news and offering a copy of the book, Getting Up When Life Knocks You Down, to every blogger who wanted one. In addition to our Online Outreach, we focused on building a presence on social networks, creating profiles, groups, and pages. Finally, the campaign heavily utilized Twitter and Facebook to message thousands of friends and followers on a daily basis.

RESULTS: The campaign met with huge amounts of positive response with hundreds of blogs and book reviews written and posted. Changing a brand is never an easy thing and is not done overnight, for this reason, we were very excited to retain Survivor Corps over a 2-year long term contract enabling us to continue building up a presence in the social media space.

Testimonial: 

           "Chris Abraham and his team have been a critical catalyst for the online debut of SURVIVOR CORPS. They helped us create a blogging buzz around the launch of Survivor Corps, offering savvy counsel on strategically targeted audiences who would resonate with our mission. They cleverly leveraged the release of my book -- Getting Up When Life Knocks You Down: Five Steps to Overcoming a Life Crisis -- to generate word of mouth promotion online and cultivate new supporters for our work to help survivors of war in the United States and abroad. Chris and his team will jump into a campaign with passion and panache. They've been responsive to our needs and a pleasure to work with from day one."
Jerry White, Co-Founder, and Director, Survivor Corps"

Habitat for Humanity “World Habitat Day” Case Study

CHALLENGE: World Habitat Day is held on the first Monday of October every year. We were tasked with helping Habitat for Humanity raise the online profile of World Habitat Day to encourage advocacy, foster education and increase donations

STRATEGY/TACTICS: Leverage the influence of bloggers in target demographics to increase coverage of World Habitat Day.

We reached out to over 2,600 bloggers covering topics relevant to urban planning and humanitarian aid. To better equip each blogger with special content relating to World Habitat Day, the team created a social media news release including embeddable pictures, videos, banner ads, and message copy that bloggers could paste into their blogs.

The purpose of the blogger outreach was to earn bloggers’ support and encourage them to act as amplifiers of the World Habitat Day message motivating readers to become involved in the effort.

RESULTS: Drastically increased the amount of online coverage for the event over 635% from the previous year – 31 articles to 228 articles.

Those 228 earned blog posts resulted in an estimated 1+ million impressions and boosted SEO results.

Testimonial: 

           “On behalf of Habitat for Humanity International (HFHI), thank you for your company’s pro bono work on World Habitat Day blogger outreach. We were astounded by the results achieved by Chris Abraham and his team, and we appreciated your donation of staff time and resources.”
Colleen Fitzgerald, Director of Advocacy, Habitat for Humanity

Snuggle Crème Premium Fabric Softener Case Study

CHALLENGE: Drive branding of the new Snuggle Crème premium fabric softener via online social media.

STRATEGY/TACTICS: Drive demand for a $2-off coupon by leveraging the influence of hundreds of bloggers in target demographics.

Snuggle had already identified two promising assets to be used in traditional media: a $2-off coupon and the Snuggle Bear. To ensure these would be appealing to bloggers as well, we combined the two into an animated widget.

We identified a set of over 2000 bloggers for four separate outreaches over an eight-week period. We created a social media news release complete with the embeddable widget, information, images, video, coupons, etc. Then began launching their personalized outreach campaign.

RESULTS: Demand for the coupon exceeds maximum projections by 100% - Branding reaches over 2 million impressions via online influencers.

Our efforts garnered hundreds of earned media mentions on behalf of Snuggle Crème. The online social media news release (SMNR) microsite we created for the campaign received over 200,000 hits. Huge spikes in online conversation were witnessed after each of our four outreaches. 

Contact Us

Chris Abraham, CEO

P +1 202-352-5051

E [email protected]

www.gerr.is

Daniel Krueger, COO

E [email protected]

www.gerr.is