I’ve been reading through Edward Bernays‘ 1928 book “Propaganda” and I’ve really been enjoying it. Now, the word “propaganda” has been given a bad reputation, but really it’s what PR, marketing, politics, and the world is all about. As old Edward says, “The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine.” Of course when you’re trying to promote a person,. product, company, or brand you’re working in propaganda.

Bernays would have been right at home in the digital era, working to influence the top bloggers. Even in 1928 he pointed out, “If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group which they sway.”

The business world may have forgotten it for a while, but what Bernays wrote so long ago still rings true, “Business realizes that its relationship to the public is not confined to the manufacture and sale of a given product, but includes at the same time the selling of itself and of all those things for which it stands in the public mind.” A company or brand has to sell itself to the public before it can hope to sell its product.

It seems that Bernays would have loved the social media revolution that the business world is taking part in. As he said, “Business must express itself and its entire corporate existence so that the public will understand and accept it.” What better way for a business to do that than to reach out in the most direct and social ways possible.

The father of modern PR is still kicking around and still completely relevant.

Shari Leventhal popped me an email letting me know that her agency, Firemedia Partners, has a new partner in John A. Lack, Chief Partner.  These are the guys behind Firebrand…  I always mourn the loss of Firebrand whenever Super Bowl comes around — Firebrand Monday! I loved that site.

Dear Chris,

We hope this email finds you well and that you are as excited about 2010 as we are. We’re especially excited to report that John A. Lack has officially joined our team as Chief Partner solidifying our industry leadership in building new businesses and media solutions for an ever-expanding multi-platform world.

We’re inviting you to have the first look at our press announcement (see below) and website.

firemediapartners.com

Thanks for taking a look around. If you want further information or if you think there’s someone we should be reaching out to, please let us know.

Wishing a happy and healthy new year to you and yours.

The FireMedia Partners
info@firemediapartners.com
T 954 673 4164

Start rockin’ your red white and blue because this Friday marks the beginning of the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games in Vancouver, BC. The city will welcome all of the worthy competitors and their diehard fans who are lucky enough to see these world-class athletes live.  For those of us who cannot make it to Vancouver and witness the excitement first-hand, TeamUSA.org is giving fans a chance to take part in all the action.

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

Team USA has been training hard.  We must recognize their admirable accomplishments and cheer our hearts out to help the great USA take home some sweet gold.  Register now to be ready for Olympic fever!

Trolls, their process is simple and easily dealt with once you understand it. In case you’re wondering what a troll is:

In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion. –Wikipedia

Here is a flowchart that shows the most efficient and often used process for trolling. As you can see if you (the target) don’t respond then the troll will move on fairly quickly.

Now that you are armed with a deeper understanding of the ways of trolls, go forth and defend!

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

They agreed, so I started planning a very quick informational blogger outreach.  The purpose of this outreach was to let bloggers around the world know about IMC’s good work and their mission to get doctors in-country to help the injured, hungry, and dehydrated residents of Port au Prince and Haiti in general.

Well, I brought my idea to our Abraham Harrison weekly management team meeting on January 18th and initiated a campaign to deliver 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 for our January 20th outreach and here’s the email I 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 names for us, ever –  but as a representative International Medical Corps.

We act as consultants for our clients so we feel comfortable reaching out as extensions of them on these client-approved campaigns.  Usually the sole link we include in these messages goes to our own  Social Media News Release — see USOC, FAF, OLX, MotionBox, BrandsClub, etc — but in the rush to do this pro bono time-sensitive outreach, we were happy that IMC already had a landing page / microsite developed for the campaign,  http://www.imcworldwide.org/haiti.  Their link was already perfectly useful and met all of the outreach campaign needs.

While we generally do a three wave campaign with two follow-ups emails after 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 I was willing to risk a little because it is a very good, publicly-popular, uncontroversial, humane, and timely historical event and I really wanted the largest and broadest 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, I 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 work down there; especially to those who will continue working on rebuilding Haiti and helping Haitians well past the time when 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.

Facebook just celebrated its 6th birthday and used the opportunity to come out with some changes. The social networking site changed its layout and  took power over management of display ads and will be selling the ad space on their own (used to be sold exclusively through Microsoft/Bing).

We don’t really focus on display ads, but the change of management of ad space sales means two things: it will allow Facebook to negotiate the targeted space at a much higher rate (Assuming that Facebook won’t increase the amount of ad space on this intrusion-sensitive atmosphere) and it will allow the company to fully explore the advertising potential of Facebook Connect, which already has 60 million users and growing. There is speculation about opening up to Google and Yahoo, but it is unlikely that the company would once again share the winnings of this “cash cow”.

Now to the good stuff: Facebook’s new site design. A lot of buttons were moved around. For example, there are no more tabs on the home page, instead, the news feed/photos/info/etc. were moved to the side bar. Notifications button was moved along with account settings, and  a few other buttons.

Honestly, the feature that will help good PR agencies (A&H being on top) is the “Top News” option that now appears on the news feed. By the way, good PR agencies are responsible and aware of the socialsphere and our goal is to not only to talk about the brand, but mostly to get other people to talk about it. What “Top News” will do is move the most popular (most commented and liked) posts to the top of the “Top News” news feed. Since our very philosophy is to post stuff that will be commented and liked, this new feature will make it so our posts stay on top. The user will still be able to change from “Top News” to “Most Recent” by clicking on the link right above the status update box.

Overall, the changes made were very positive. Other than the specific benefits I mentioned above, the new layout is a lot more user-friendly and provides all of the needed options and menus at the user’s fingertips. Now that Facebook will be increasing its advertising revenue we can expect more features to come!

Just found this top secret Organization Chart that shows that Abraham Harrison llc works for the Illuminati! At first I couldn’t believe it, but now it all makes so much sense. What better way to sway world events than a Digital PR and Social Media Marketing company?

(disclaimer: All in good fun folks, all in good fun.)

After Chris’ post on “How Blogger Outreach Works at Abraham Harrison“, some great comments were made and questions were raised on how the follow up process works and how to reach the highest influence from such a huge database of bloggers.

One of the most important pieces of a successful blogger outreach is staying relevant. There is huge database of bloggers today and although it might be tempting, you must limit your outreaches to your target audience. It has been a long-standing industry practice to email as many people as possible and hope that some of them will bite. This is why A&H has been so successful when it comes to blogger outreaches. Bloggers are so surprised to find a person on the other side of the conversation that they become more personal, more attentive and more responsive. This is the basic idea behind a blogger outreach follow up. A lot of bloggers don’t respond to the first email thinking that the information is not relevant to them, it is spam or it is just not worth asking questions to a robot. We find that a lot of times we receive a lot more responses from the 2nd or 3rd follow ups than we did on the 1st.

The basic guidelines for a good follow up are:

• Let them know you are following up. It’s not the first time you are reaching them, so don’t change the message completely, hoping they will think it’s something new, because it will backfire.
• Talk like a person. As it was mentioned before, this was a targeted outreach. Don’t speak in totally general terms and don’t make it clear that you used a name replacement tool, if you did. (don’t you hate it when car insurance companies call you with that recorded message and they just replace your name in a different tone)
• Focus on a short message that will tell them what you want and what they can gain from it. (special gifts or privileges to bloggers go a long way)
• Have the information ready. A lot of bloggers will just copy the information that you send to them, so make sure it is ready to go into a post.
• Do a blog search. There are many tools for this and what you might find out is that they already posted, but haven’t told you yet. If this is the case, it is still good to send a thank you email.

In conclusion, please stay relevant. I’ve said before that this is what separates us from the rest of the PR agencies out there. Once your information is relevant, you have bargaining power to follow up and let them know that this information is exactly what they need.

This morning, our intern, Ellie Brown, asked me if it would be OK to blog about her experience as an American University-credited intern at Abraham Harrison.  Of course! Of course!  Well, here it is, enjoy, My super fantastic internship:

Hi everyone!  My name is Ellie and I am here to share with you the trials and tribulations of my internship this semester with Abraham Harrison LLC.  I am a grad student getting my master’s in Public Communication and hope to someday be a a snarky public relations executive at a big company where I can boss interns around all day…just like Chris Abraham, president of Abraham Harrison.Actually, that couldn’t be further from the truth.  My internship so far has been anything but getting bossed around.  Abraham Harrison is a public relations company that engages in social media management, online grassroots & new media marketing, business intelligence, search engine services and online reputation clean-up.  Really, really cool stuff.

My responsibilities so far have been reading up on all the latest social media news and info, writing about it for the company blog Marketing Conversation, helping out with blogger outreach for International Medical Corps to raise money for Haiti, and whatever else comes up.  Oh and did I mention this was all done from the comfort of my own home (or the uncomfort of the AU library)?  That’s right, AH doesn’t have a physical office.  Everything we work on is done online and staff live all over the world.  It’s pretty great.

My introduction has been brief, but I hope you’ll check back every now and again to see what I’m up to.  More about blogger outreach next time…

Ellie Brown 9:35 am on February 1, 2010

Wow, that was great.  Uh oh, I surely hope we don’t screw everything up for all of the NYC, SF, DC, Atlanta, Chicago, and Boston agencies and firms that spend most of their time abusing their interns while making them go in Starbucks runs and all of that filing and photocopying and dry cleaning pick up and so forth.

Funny thing is, we had an Intern once, Lasse, who insisted we find him a proper job in a proper office, requiring him to wear proper shirts and slacks and shoes and — gasp — ties and jackets!  To each his own, I guess.

The White House is taking social media very seriously. White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer says, “It’s almost impossible to stay on top of everything that’s happening,” in a world where old and new media have merged.

Pfeiffer, is a frequent poster on the White House blog. Pfeiffer says the White House Blog is “a digital version of the White House briefing, where we’ll comment on stories or post responses, and then bloggers will comment on what we write. We try to influence the daily swirl, in that sense.”