Last week we explored Saul’s Thoughts on What AH Does etc as part of our What AH Does series. Well, it isn’t quite a week yes, but Dani Sevilla did such a grand job of answering, “What does Abraham Harrison do, in your eyes and in your own words,” that I just couldn’t wait, so here we go (and thanks, Dani):
Dani’s Thoughts on What AH Does etc.
I figured I would steal Saul’s format since I liked it so much. I however, am chatting up a 40 year old exec who has never heard of blogging beyond those crazy political bloggers who get on the news.
Cocktail Party Synopsis:
Exec: Dani, that’s so convenient and eco-friendly that you work from home, very green and what not, but what exactly is it that this Abraham & Harrison place does?
Dani: AH specializes in online public relations within the social media realm.
Exec: What’s the social media realm you might ask?
Dani: Well, we work within social networks, like Facebook and MySpace and we also reach out to bloggers throughout the blogosphere.
Exec: Blogo-what-now?
Dani: Haha, yes keeping up with internet-savvy lingo is half the fun. By “blogosphere” I simply mean the vast and ever-expanding community of bloggers worldwide who range in passions from sports to politics and from interests as varied as middle eastern cuisine and green politics. These blogs, as well as these social networks create very real and sometimes very large communities of people with common interest that we are able to reach out to via various different mediums to discuss and create interest in a service, project, cause, or good for our clients.
Exec: Ok so how is this public relations exactly?
Dani: What we’re doing is generating a presence for our client where there wasn’t one before. Whether it’s a defensive campaign to protect an individual or company’s online presence against defamatory articles that can spread at lightening speed across the internet, or just a company or person looking for a new way to spread some news about something they are doing, we open up a space for their message where there wasn’t one before. We go beyond just sending out the message but engage with the social media landscape and teach our clients about it along the way so that they are comfortable with and can in many cases continue to grow their online presence.
AH Business Plan:
Exec: That’s all well and good, but where do you see this AH as you call it going in the future?
Dani: Funny that you ask, because we’ve been discussing this within the company quite a bit lately. I think we do a couple of things really well and we should continue to leverage these talents. We are excellent at generating interest what, for lack of a better term, I will call “human interest” stories. So we’ve had a lot of success generating buzz for some of our NGO clients. Their stories are interesting and appeal to a community effort to have the story heard and we are dealing with a community. We make the story easily accessible to the community and they want to start talking about it. They want to spread the information with their readers with there friends.
Dani: This is why I think that we could do really well promoting books as well. These are things people want to share, they want to tell someone about a great book they read, that offered a new insight for example into a topic.
Exec: A community spreading the word?
Dani: It’s not different than neighborhood gossip, but more often than not the message we’re spreading is much more valuable. What are the stories that travel around your community, or easier yet, think back to rumors in high school… If stories are told well, if they provoke someone, if they peak their interest they disseminate themselves organically throughout a community.
Dani: Bloggers want to share these stories with their readers, social network users want to let their friends know about the cause, it’s as organic as turning to your friend Shirley at the lunch table and telling her Ms. Sprockets picks her nose.
Dani: These are REAL communities, NOT virtual ones, and they act like it.
What we do that is cool?
Exec: You think you do this well?
Dani: Listen, I know we do it well. We are great at getting a message out there, especially via email which we have been working with a lot lately. We follow up with every response, we ensure people that they are talking with a real person who is truly interested in what they are trying to tell you.
What do you think we do that is most effective?
Dani: This is what is incredibly effective about our technique. We follow up and follow through with the people we reach out to. And with the new tools that we will be instituting soon to keep track of our contacts throughout the blogosphere we will be able to do this infinitely better. One of our greatest assets are our universes of blogs and bloggers and I think they are going to prove way more useful when we have then all in one system.
Where would you like the company to grow?
Dani: NGOs is where we do our best work and also the most interesting. I think we have the greatest potential to expand here as well as other fields that provoke interest within communities (large or small) throughout the internet. Entertainment – books, online magazines, etc.
Who do you think we should reach out to?
Dani: See above.
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I love the cocktail party analogy a lot when I explain what I blog about and what I do in terms of marketing– because it’s very much that sort of situation and particularly when I describe Facebook, Twitter and select blogs — a la Chris Abraham, Abraham Harrison and Marketing Conversations. What I try to explain that there are many ways of presenting things and one of the most effective is much like a cocktail party where people are relaxed, can chat a little (or a lot) about a variety of topics. I find that AH aligns with my way of doing business and covering the topics that I cover.
Given that my “conversation” topics are growing, it’s getting interesting