Monthly Archives: May 2010

What Abraham Harrison Does In 65 Words And Our New Video Introduction

Chris Abraham, the President at Abraham Harrison llc, asked me to help out with expressing in 75 words or less what it is that we do here at Abraham Harrison. We managed to wrangle it down to a solid 65 words:

Abraham Harrison does the leg work for companies hoping to connect with their customers and strengthen their social media presence, which leads to a stronger company via creating greater customer loyalty through creation of new conversation and increased brand leverage in the current online conversation. We help companies reach out to bloggers, twitterers, and the facebook / myspace crowd in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and other languages.

Also, recently we had a really amazing video illustrating how we work created:

Transcript:

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 the machines 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.

What Abraham Harrison Does In 65 Words And Our New Video Introduction

My wish list to Facebook Santa

Facebook is awesome. We are the first ones to tip our hats when they come out with great new ideas like the open graph protocol, the “like” button, Facebook Connect, etc. Nevertheless, I must say that Facebook’s constant search of new offerings is getting in the way of its improvement. When I see the news of Facebook heavily investing its resources on new features, I get nervous. The reason is that there are plenty of services that Facebook already offers that need improvement, specially when it comes to analytics. Let’s go through the list:

Facebook Insights for Pages – I would love to have the capability to analyze which tabs people spent the most time on and which tabs have the highest bounce rate. I’m not even going to get into how awful and unfriendly the graphs are on there (I believe it’s a given).
Facebook Ads – There is plenty of room for improvement here, so let’s take a step at a time:

Not being able to set a budget for the whole campaign is a turn off. Right now, FB only allows you to set a daily budget, which you have to watch carefully constantly to make sure you are on track. Please give us the choice of setting the budget for the whole campaign!
Currently, Insights report on clicks and actions. Actions can mean “Likes” or engagement like a RSVP to an event. C’mon FB! Just give us the number of “likes” (fans) we received, so we can accurately measure our results.
The graphs for ad results, once again fall short by limiting the variables to clicks, impressions and CTR. I say we need to add at least “likes” (fans), cost per like and conversion rate (clicks/likes).
The landing page of the ads can go two ways right now: a FB page (internal link) or an external link to the company’s website. What if I want the people who click on the ad to land on the FB page, but on a different tab? The only way to keep it “internal” is to link it to the page and set the page to have your special tab as a landing page for everyone. If you used the url for that specific tab on the ad, it would be no longer “internal”, which means people cannot become fans right from the ad. Here’s what we need: an option to set a FB Page’s tab as an “internal” link, allowing people to become fans right from the ad and land on a specific tab.

These are the things that will be included in my list to Facebook Santa this year.

What’s intriguing about Facebook not investing in these features is that there are thousands of companies out there who would be willing to pay for these services. I definitely would.

If there is anything to add to this list, please feel free to do so in the comments.

Hanging with the wrong crowd including Richard Laermer

While I have not explicitly asked Richard Laermer to my mentor and my PR guru, he is.

He is also my friend, so maybe he won’t be comfortable with mentoring me. Well, oh well. Anyway, he’s currently working on sharing his How to Fame manifesto — today’s HTF Tip #3 is how and why to Hang with the wrong crowd:

Culpability for lack of fame does not fall completely on the shoulders of the Fameless. Enablers are all around us, supporting our misguided attempts to Fame. We call them friends, and they’re usually just like us. But, it’s because of that shared identity that we don’t always get, as Paul Harvey would say, “the rest of the story” about how we’re truly viewed by the rest of the world.

Our friends know us really well; probably even to the point that they’ve seen through our veiled public persona (knowing that our actual personality is very different). They don’t call us on it, though, because they’re our friends … and there’s a good chance they share many of the same traits! Now, this doesn’t particularly bother us because, after all, we have friends and might not necessarily feel like we need new ones.

Or, we don’t think we have an impact on others’ lives, so why bother? Remember, you don’t have to be a “person of influence” to be influential. Faming isn’t about making friends; it’s about taking hold of your positive traits and using them to influence the rest of humanity (non-friends). Think about who influences you on a daily basis … Why did you buy that shirt? Why did you follow the career path you’re on? Why, indeed. Inevitably, there is “someone” that influences you every single day. And, whether you know it or not, you’re influencing them.

To maximize our Faming experience, we need to step out of Plato’s cave for a while. You don’t have to ditch all of your friends and forget your roots, like a character in every sports movie ever made; you just need to be aware (see Tip #1: Perception) that your social group is not likely to be a representative sample of the people who make snap judgments about you on an every day basis.

Here’s to stepping out of your comfort zone, becoming more aware and tuning in to the cues that matter.

Hanging with the wrong crowd including Richard Laermer

Traditional Media: Do They Give Us What We want?

: Image via Wikipedia

When I was doing my daily morning Internet search today I stumbled across a Mashable article on the disconnect between the kind of news that the mainstream media reports and the kind of news that social media reporters find “newsworthy.” Here is a link to the article New Versus Old Media.

To sum the article up the Pew Research Center has done a study and found that different kinds of social media sites are more interested in sharing different kinds of news. For example, 43% of the news that gets linked out on Twitter is about technology. In contrast the most popular types of news to be shared on YouTube are videos of Foreign Events at 26 %. Blogs slightly favor politics and Government at 17%.

What is interesting about all this is what kind of stories are traditional media outlets writing? Are they writing for a “social” audience? The answer, of course, is no. Only one percent of their stories involved technology, and their two main focuses are politics and health care, neither of which are overwhelmingly popular topics on social media sites. Personally, I find it amazing that after years of this “social media thing” mainstream news still hasn’t decided to embrace it. Sure there are feeble attempts to incorporate Twitter into broadcasts or what not, but overall they are still neglecting to embrace the technology and thus continuing to see their readerships decline. Instead of making social media an ally they continue to treat it as a fade and as a foe, furthering the woes of the traditional media.