With over 180 million internet users and 900% growth rate since 2000, there is no denying it; audiences in Latin America are massively moving into the online arena and what used to be predictions are now reality. Incredibly enough, this is not the main reason why we see an unbelievable potential for social media in these markets. The main reason is the culture.

We have invested our resources in finding a very diverse staff that is in touch with cultural trends in Latin America. We were moved to do this after watching numbers like mentioned above and the growth of Twitter, Facebook, Orkut and blogging activies amongst others. There are a few facets to the Latin American culture that present a great opportunity for social media. We fully understand the particular cultural differences within these countries, which is why we chose a diverse team that will work with the highest cultural knowledge whether it's in Mexico or Brazil.

What they do have in common is the need to be part of the conversation. Generally, the whole web has grown to be this way, but what makes Latin America special is the way that opinions are expressed. The interaction surrounding blog posts is incredible. There are millions of blogs in the region and we are proud to be one of the first Social Media companies to explore the market and already have a track record of great success in Latin America.

Abraham & Harrison has worked with international companies that expanded into this market and with local companies that needed professional assistance. The results were above even our own expectations and above what our clients could even imagine. As the information age progresses into an increasingly globalized world, our strong presence in Latin America is guaranteed by our strong engagement and conversation skills.

Tomorrow marks the first day of the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games in Vancouver, BC.  Years of training, hard work, discipline and relentless dedication have given the great athletes of Team USA the right edge to grab that gold.  To make sure you keep track of who is skiing the fastest and skating the hardest, register with TeamUSA.org where fans get chance to take part in all of the action.  GO USA!

Register at TeamUSA.org and you will:

• Receive exclusive updates during the Winter Games
• Get the inside scoop, event by event
• Hear directly from our Olympic athletes as they chase their dream
• Be able to download photo and video highlights, right to your desktop

There is more than one way to get involved with this year’s Olympics.  Show your support by making a donation or becoming a member the Sixth Ring.  Check out TeamUSAnews.org and get ready to rally behind the great USA!

When we at Abraham Harrison LLC heard about the devastating earthquake in Haiti on January 12th, we reached out to our friends over at International Medical Corps to offer a hand.

They agreed so we started planning a very quick blogger public affairs informational outreach to let bloggers around the world know about IMC’s good works and their mission to get doctors in-country to physically put medicine to use on the injured, hungry, and dehydrated residents of Port au Prince and Haiti.

Well, we got onto our Abraham Harrison weekly management team meeting on January 18 and initiated a campaign to craft a one email outreach to over 9,700+ English-speaking bloggers with a very short pitch and a simple plea: please post or tweet about IMC’s mission, here’s a widget if you like, we would love your readers to help. 

Here’s the email we used on our January 20th outreach and here’s the email our president, Chris Abraham, blogger, received:

From: Ellie Brown <ellie@imc-haiti.org>
Subject: Haiti still needs help

Dear Chris

International Medical Corps is a global, humanitarian, nonprofit organization, founded by volunteer doctors and nurses and dedicated to saving lives and relieving suffering through relief and development programs. Our emergency response team is in Haiti responding in force and I would like to ask for your help to get the word out to the readers of Because the Medium is the Message. There are still thousands of patients seeking treatment of which approximately 80% are in need of surgery and are running out of time – especially with the tremendous aftershocks still devastating this country. The team is treating crush injuries, trauma, substantial wound care, shock and other critical cases with the few available supplies – And they’re in it for the long haul.  I would love your help spreading the word by blogging or tweeting about IMC’s rescue efforts. We’ve put up a blogger friendly widget here on our site:

http://www.imcworldwide.org/haiti

With the widget it’s really easy to let your readers know that donating $10 to help the people of Haiti is as simple as sending a text message of the word “haiti” to 85944. If you have any questions just let me know and I will do my best to help you out. If you are able to post the widget or tweet, I would appreciate it if you could send me the link.

Thanks so much,

Ellie

–
Ellie Brown
International Medical Corps
ellie@imc-haiti.org

If you’ll notice, we were very explicit with what we asked, what we needed.  We also reached out with Ellie Brown’s real name — as we do in all of our campaigns, no false name for us, ever –  but as representing International Medical Corps. 

We act as consultants for our clients so we feel comfortable reaching out as our clients on these client-blessed campaigns. 

Also, the sole link we included usually goes to our own bespoke Social Media News Release — see USOC, FAF, OLX, MotionBox, BrandsClub, etc — but in the rush around doing this pro bono rush outreach, we were happy that IMC already had a landing page / microsite already developed for the campaign,  http://www.imcworldwide.org/haiti, which is perfectly useful and meets all of our outreach campaign needs.

While we generally do a three wave campaign with two follow-ups on the initial ask, in this case time was of the essence, so we just made one single request outreach.

Also, we generally don’t do outreaches as aggressive as the 9,700+ strong outreach we did in this case for IMC — generally closer to 2,000-per-outreach — but we was willing to risk a little because it is a very good, uncontroversial, popularly-supported, and timely event and we really wanted the largest impact possible.

So far in this unique campaign we have been able to log 171 earned media mentions that could be directly connected to our outreach, not secondary or tertiary “echoes.”

Next week, we will post all of the blogs and tweets — 171 — that we have received between the initial outreach on January 20th, when we sent out the request, the ask, and January 26th, when the campaign organically concluded.

Our hearts and prayers go out to the residents of Haiti and to all of those noble folks who are doing good works down there and will continue working on rebuilding Haiti and helping Haitians well past the media moves on to something else.  We love International Medical Corps because they always invest in communities long term and that’s what Haiti needs right now: commitment.

Via Marketing Conversation

We currently have around 80,000 bloggers in our lists, but those lists are not used like traditional mailing lists, because of the constant new growth and attrition in the blogosphere.

With each new client, and each new outreach, we identify with the client what the demographic is they want to reach, then we ID the bloggers who are leading and influencing that demographic. We call these groups of bloggers that we identify as the group influencers a "universe".

The universes are built by rechecking the existing lists (adding newcomers and culling deadwood), and by building up brand new lists (since each client has a different set of demographics they want to reach.

We then reach out to these bloggers in a 4-6 week campaign which includes an initial semi-personalized outreach email, followed up by 2-4 follow-up emails. The emails are terse and the majority of the messaging is "outsourced" to a social media news release (SMNR - a one-page simple HTML microsite) that is a "steal me" sheet for the bloggers to make their blogging about our client super easy. Here is an example of an SMNR:  http://freshairholiday.org/

Each one of these outreach cycles generally leads to 100-300 social media mentions in blogs and on twitter (depending on how intriguing the client's message and offering is), invariably reaching millions and in many of our campaign's cases, 10MM+ people.

We integrate twitter campaigns (followership-building, messaging, and community engagement), Facebook, Youtube promotion, and A-list outreach as well. The most basic of our campaigns start at $5000 a month, and the more complex campaigns top $20K per month.

"Abraham & Harrison’s unique approach to PR is refreshing. It was exactly what we needed to take our market exposure to the next level. Working within a prescribed budget, they were able to deliver results that both exceeded our expectations and inspired new opportunities for PR. I have no doubt that we will come to Abraham & Harrison again for our PR needs" -- Josh Grotstein, CEO, Motionbox, Inc.

More testimonials

"On behalf of Habitat for Humanity International (HFHI), thank you for your company’s pro bono work on World Habitat Day blogger outreach during the fall of 2009. We were astounded by the results achieved by Abraham and Harrison (A&H), and we appreciated your donation of staff time and resources." -- Colleen Fitzgerald, Director of Advocacy Implementation, Habitat for Humanity International

"Abraham & Harrison has been doing a terrific job for brandsclub. Not only have they created and managed our twitter account, that has the most followers in the world for our business model, their outreaches have gotten us tons of responses. Last but not least they are always coming up with great suggestions and worldwide contacts for any crazy idea you might come up with. I would recommend them to anyone!" -- Olivier Grinda, Co-Founder and CMO, BrandsClub

More testimonials

We have been brainstorming and updating the products and services -- as well as the descriptions -- offered by Abraham Harrison and we thought we would share a working version of some of the social media and social network development and managament services.  Please let us know what you think.

Online Business Intelligence
Tracking and monitoring the online reputation of your brand, company, product, and services on your behalf, as a way of keeping track of conversation real-time.  Unless reporting is explicitly agreed to, this “open source intelligence” will be monitored for content, friendliness, and threat. Any and all threats are triaged and reported to the appropriate client point of contact.

Online Media and Social Media Metrics
Abraham Harrison maintains a suite of tools, algorithms, and strategies that allow us to provide you and your client with bona fide measurements, including reach, tone, and sentiment.  This suite of tools allow us to create illustrative proof, over time, of the efficacy of the campaign from the launch and over time.

Campaign Metrics and ROI Reporting
Intelligence plus metric plus time equals reports. Client and campaign reporting is something that needs to be defined and agreed to in advance of the campaign because reports are not built into the campaign but are a la carte and you get to define the specificity and granularity of the reporting.  Generally, reports are done bi-weekly or monthly, usually interspersed with weekly updates and “as needed” alerts.

Twitter Community-Building Services
Twitter is not a broadcast medium, it is a community-prospecting platform.  In order for the entire community to take shape and take bloom, one needs to not simply register an account, one needs to design, populate, and then prospect followers before there can be any real growth.  This community-building leverages both our collected contacts and current community relationships as well as several tools that we use to help promote and grow online reputation and growth of your Twitter online reputation.  In other words, like everything online, if you build it they won’t come.  Building it is a start, if course, but unless you’re Oprah or Ashton Kutcher, there is a lot of work and a lot of building, promotion, and prospecting required, and that is what Abraham Harrison LLC can do for you.

Twitter Posts and Posting Services
Twitter has become an essential part of online branding. Companies, celebrities, brands, and even fictional entities have been leveraging the ease-of-use and the simplicity of Twitter to both communication with current and potential customers as well as being able to engage and respond to user question, user requests, and user responses.  However, it isn’t as simple as posting status updates to Twitter regularly.  In our process, we work with the client to come up with 25-100 pre-approved “tweets” that the client can approve, veto, or edit.  Over time, AHLLC is able to message on behalf of you, the client, with messages that are consistent with client vision. After that, the messages are delivered to the Twitter stream with an approved frequency, from once-per-day to a couple posts to multiple-posts-per-day, with the frequency according to the scope of the contract.  During this process, it is also important — essential — to trust the Twitter team to be able to triage all replies and direct messages on behalf of the client — or, there needs to be a rapid process to triage replies and direct messages through the client.  As the campaign moves forward, the evolution of the campaign can change to offer more and more independence to the Twitterer.

Twitter Retweets and Retweeting Services
The secret sauce of Twitter is retweeting (retweet (RT)): a) to copy a tweet and then send it again on Twitter. b) passing along of messages in Twitter) Retweeting is the epitome of what makes Twitter such a powerful tool.

Retweeting allows Twitterers to repeat content from one Twitter stream they’re following onto all of their own followers.  Writing compelling tweets is what organically can result in retweets down the Twitter stream; however, it is also important to use Retweets as a form of reciprocal currency. Retweeting someone else’s tweet can engender attention or connection and build social equity within the “Twitterverse.”

In addition to intentionally retweeting on a client’s behalf, one of the benefits of running your Twitter campaign through Abraham Harrison LLC is that you are able to instantaneously have all of your client tweets retweeted through not only our staff’s Twitter accounts but through all the status-update social network sites our staff is a member of.

This allows our clients to automatically enter the conversation well in advance of their earned reputation online.

Twitter Message Modeling and Copywriting Services
In our process, we work with the client to come up with 25-100 pre-approved “tweets” that the client can approve, veto, or edit.  Over time, AHLLC is able to message on behalf of you, the client, with messages that are consistent with client vision. After that, the messages are delivered to the Twitter stream with an approved-to frequency, from once-per-day to a couple posts to multiple-posts-per-day, with the frequency according to the scope of the contract.

Active and Reactive Tweeting, Real-Time Twitter Customer Serives Services
Twitter is more than messaging and updating the Twitter status, Twitter offers the opportunity to use the real-time web to discover conversation around your products, services, and brands and either collect the intelligence for reporting or action or to engage the conversation, be it through use of @replies, Direct Messages (DMs), Retweets, or even the addition of hash tags.  The Twittersphere is considered real-time so it is essential to keep up-to-the second with a constant flow of twitter mentions.  The best thing about Twitter is that one may also easily engage real people who are mentioning your brand or the brand of your competitor.  You can also mention these people, retweet them, or help them with any sort of problem they may well be having with you, your produces, your services, or your general customer support.

YouTube development
While it is simple to join YouTube, there are quite a few important steps one must take before launching. First of all, there is a lot of customization that one can do to make sure a client’s YouTube channel blends well with the client brand identity, mirroring the parent brand.  In addition, structuring the channel, making sure the channel name is appropriate, and also make sure that if there needs to be content that plays for more than the standard 5-minute limit the ways to extend that (even to hours) are implemented. There are ways to make revenue as well, through Google AdSense.

Since Abraham Harrison LLC staff has been using YouTube since it was launched in 2005, we understand it well – most of all that, unlike television channels, YouTube is not simply a broadcast medium but rather primarily a community platform.  Like Twitter and other online communities like MySpace and Facebook, YouTube allows, and is most powerful with, a very deep level of participation.  Many companies, looking for the next viral hit or just a YouTube land-grab tend to forget this.

It is important to not simply create the YouTube channel and make it pretty, it is important to also upload all of the videos required as well, knowing what the most appropriate file type, file size, and file quality it appropriate for each particular application or requirement.  It is also important to customize the set-up based on how the client wants to share the content and with whom.

Online Video Distribution Services
Sometimes the community maintenance required for YouTube channel creation is too much for a particular client requirement or campaign and what is needed, instead, is a complete and comprehensive video upload to all of the current video sharing sites.

This video distribution service offers a quick and comprehensive upload to over 30 video upload and social network sites, including the usual suspects but also including many other less-popular and less well-known social networks; however, in order to best cover all possible opportunities for brand video sharing, it is always a good idea to make sure the client brand experience and client video assets always exist exactly where and when people are looking for them.

In addition, one of the largest ways people choose their video content in today’s market is through word-of-mouth and sharing, which we can help you ignite; however, a more predictable and common way of discovering content online – and the only way of discovering the content if the word of mouth does not include sharing links – is search. Doing a comprehensive video upload and distribution is a way of stacking the deck towards the discovery of the content organically by flooding the search engine indices with client content — which can result in the ownership of the content.  Video distribution is an important strategy towards controlling and promoting brand perception online – the secret sauce of the social web.

Facebook Page Creation
In the past, there were many methods for promoting on Facebook; however, Facebook is clamping down on Terms of Service (TOS) violations.  As a result of – and in response to – people creating profiles that do not reflect authentic people but brands, products, services, or fictional entities, Facebook has replaced business profiles and business groups with Facebook Pages.  Pages are entities not unlike profiles, and are becoming more and more like profiles. Like profiles, Pages have walls, updates, videos, events, and all the rest. Additionally, they interact with peoples’ statuses in much the same way that Facebook Profiles do.

When creating a Facebook Page or Group or Cause, it is important to remember that these Facebook Apps are community-oriented and need to be fed and watered.  The tools support community, conversation, and collaboration and many people develop these Facebook Pages as if they were a published brochure instead of a dynamic, developing, conversational community.  These communities are needy, more like a blog or like Twitter than anything like a page. A MySpace profile can be developed more like a proper web page, but Pages offer the opportunity to share Events, Conversation, Links, Discussion, Photos, Videos, etc. While they don’t have to be completely open and interactive, they do need to be responsive and there needs to be a certain level of maintenance and content creation committed to the Facebook Page.

There is a lot to know about the Pages, however, and there are many 3rd party tools and services that can be used to expand brand, including doing Facebook Ads and the like, to help promote the brand.

In order to best promote “fan” membership of a Facebook Page, one needs to be creative as to the reason why being a fan is worthwhile.  Some easy “gifts” can include exclusive content, Facebook-only offers, “live” interviews, access to celebrities or notables, etc.  When an online brand reputation

One of the things that makes Facebook Pages better than either Facebook Profiles or Facebook Groups is that the content is not hidden behind the Facebook Authentication Membership Wall.  More like MySpace profiles and groups, which are completely visible and partially accessible when not yet a registered member of the site, Facebook Pages are one of the few “rooms” in the mostly “gated community” of Facebook proper.  Facebook Pages can be indexed by search engines like a normal web page and found using simple keywords through Google, Live.com, Ask.com, and Yahoo!

One of the beautiful things about Facebook Pages is that Google loves Facebook more than just about any other web site (Google loves Twitter more) so brands that have a Facebook Page are often surprised by how quickly the Page turns up on the first page of search.

There are other ways of promoting brand on Facebook, which can include cross promotions with other Social Networks (have all of the networks aimed at the Page), organic SEO strategies, Facebook Ads, as well as incorporating a strong blogger outreach campaign aimed at brand promotion.

However, that said, it is hard to start a Facebook Page and we generally recommend starting with a Facebook Group.  It is much easier to prospect new memberships, invite new members, and get everything started from zero, so we often start with a Group, build that up to over 1,000 members, and then have the Group converted into becoming a Facebook Page, which is what we have the connections to do.  We call it the one-two sling-shot punch!

The advantage of a Facebook Page is that you can use it as a proxy web page for marketing and a proxy online community in support of your brand instead of developing or hosting your own; however, aside from being a “fan” of your company, brand, product, or service, there is little incentive, or “gift,” associated with ever returning to your Facebook Page unless you spend some time and resources developing unique content for the Page — Facebook Pages support photos, events, videos, message boards, a wall, etc –  as well as for responding to questions, queries, comments, and the like.

One of the strong advantages of smartly-but-aggressively developing messages, updates, photos, videos, and exclusive content is that the New Facebook Pages have evolved into me a lot more like the Original Facebook Profile, which includes status updates that scroll down each fan’s status update stream in exactly the same way their friends and family’s statuses update.

This is a very powerful method for brand messaging and distribution.  One of the past lacks of Facebook Groups and Facebook Pages is that it was too easy to join and forget, becoming a Group member or a Page fan and then never seeing hide nor hair of it until there was an explicit admin message to all members — a member update.

Even so, with Facebook Groups in the past, one was penalized by success because when a Facebook Group grow above 1,000-1,200 members, the ability to send a message to all members was revoked.

With the new Facebook Pages, it is easy to keep “fans” engaged and updates, through the regular status update stream that all users; unfortunately, as I mentioned above in the section about Facebook Groups, it is easier to prospect and collect new members on a Facebook Group and a Facebook Cause because it is very possible to easily invite personal Facebook “friends” to Groups and Causes.  When creating a brand profile on Facebook, it behooves one to develop all three: Facebook Page, Facebook Group, and Facebook Cause.

 

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 27 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 social media operations can have when practiced by true experts.

Results 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 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: www.abrahamharrison.com.

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 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 powerfully with your natural clientèle online and to the online influencers who are speaking to the communities you'd like to reach, and whose voices will influence those you want to reach and further bolster SEO and the presence of your brand in the search results.     

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