Chris Abraham
Social Media PR & Blogging Expert
Join the new HAI Watchdog* Community
Join the community of healthcare professionals concerned with preventing Healthcare-Associated Infections (HAIs), which at any given moment seriously affect 1.4 million hospitalized patients worldwide.
25 Essential PR Bloggers You Should Be Reading
What this will shortly result in is a renewed commitment to blogging on new media, new technology, monitoring, metrics, innovation, marketing, social media, and digital PR.
Forgive me but I guess I have been doing way too much working as president of Abraham Harrison and not enough generous, thoughtful, and insightful analysis of what I know.
So, in the upcoming days and weeks, I will aspire to re-activate. I am pretty motivated after spending a couple days with industry experts and marketing gurus at the North American Alterian Engaging Times Summit 2010 in Chicago over the last few days.
Abraham Harrison named finalist in digital PR award
New Digg Shows There’s Fight Left at Digg.com
While I consider New digg to be rather too slow in the game, having launched its new model well after people have moved on to Facebook & Twitter, I do really want to love digg for the Cult of Kevin Rose as well as for all the good things that Revision 3 has brought to the world of Web 2.0, podcasting, and online video.
Bristol Blenheim 3: Sexy, Boring, and Very Exclusive
I love cars, exotic and exclusive cars doubly so, and I was not aware of the Bristol car company of the Great Britain, either as a classic auto or a current purveyor of handmade bespoke automobiles.
I Write Like David Foster Wallace Apparently
David Foster Wallace
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!
Why Blame the Yuppies for Gentrification in Berlin
[I originally posted this over on Toytown Germany] I am constantly amused by how gentrification is considered some terrible plague by some along the same lines of a city blight or a flight.
It is always the artist’s fault. They move in to these neighborhoods because they’re poor and the ‘hoods are cheap. They open galleries and ultra-cheap-but cool little bars or get lots of square-footage lofts for cheap.
All is well until they invite a yuppie. It might very well be a patron of the arts or art collector or even a friend-of-a-friend who makes it to the bar.
Then, it is discovered and all that interest comes in: cheap new hip place that’s cheap and then the speculative real estate investors come in.
So, it is generally not the fault of the yuppies it is the fault of the cheap and poor hipsters who move into these new finds because they’re affordable and pristine and authentic — and then they create awesome little holes in the walls, boutiques, galleries, and show venues.
Hell, I am an entrepreneur and I guess yuppie and I would totally move to Neukölln now. Completely cheap and there are amazing green grocers and lots of U-Bahn access!
And I would probably feel OK to pay €500-€1500/month for a super-fly pad. And spend money in the neighborhood. Does that make me a villain?
Also, because I am there, it may well attract people who want to sell to me even though I am super-happy to shop at the Turkish groceries and bakeries.
The only way for places to remain authentic and cheap is to remain undiscovered and, at least in the USA, they need to remain red-lined and perceived at a little rough and dangerous– or at least alien and unforgiving.
It is a little too late for Neukölln but what of Wedding and Moabit?
Long-Tail Blogger Outreach Campaign Nuts & Bolts
[Originally posted on Agencyside.net, part 2 of 3. Read part 1] Our rationale behind using a long-tail strategy on behalf of our clients is that while A-list bloggers may well be at the top of their power, impact, and influence, we at Abraham Harrison invest in quality blogs and bloggers well before they’ve become so popular and pursued that they’re almost impossible to engage, generally from being busy, overwhelmed and/or well-paid for blogging. We identify bloggers who may have a smaller audience but are authentic and have readers who value their opinions.
This is not to say that we don’t ever do A-list outreach. We do. But oftentimes we start with our long-tail blogger outreach, reaching out to upwards of 2,000 bloggers at a time. When we’re done with the outreach, we’ll probably have 5 A-list bloggers and a big win with a TechCrunch post but, we’ll also make sure we have a couple hundred “additional” posts, creating a reach that goes “long” down the list of influencers and “wide” in the sense that it cuts across lots of territory in the blogosphere.
So, using our team of researchers and tools like Alterian SM2 and eCairn, we identify blogger communities and assess their interests, collect their contact info and their names, and then reach out to all of the bloggers we can find that match your demographic. We tell our researchers that if they can’t find the name and email of the blogger easily within 5 minutes then the blogger probably doesn’t want to be found. We do not let our lists and universes of blogs ever go stale. Even if we already have topic-appropriate universes for a client, we always “refresh” that universe to make sure that we remove all the abandoned blogs and add all the blogs that have, subsequent to the creation of that original universe, come online.
Once we have started collecting the universes — in the case of the HAI Watch campaign it consisted of medical professionals, patient advocates, and those writing about eldercare, as well as people writing specifically about infection and infection prevention –we start working on messaging and putting together and building up the campaign’s social media news release (SMNR).
Since I am an A-list PR and social media blogger myself, the team and I are incessantly on the receiving end of pitch after pitch. From our experience, even top PR companies are sending their pitches to bloggers, as inline email posts or as Word Doc or PDF attachments. Not only are these messages encumbered with attachments but they’re often also heavy with graphics, images, and tracking code.
Our messages consist of a simple, three-paragraph email with one link, to our online SMNR, in the form of a plaintext email. We send it as plaintext, resisting the urge to embed branding or tracking code since the only sign of success when reaching out to blogs is a post or a tweet, and keep it as simple and as short as possible, as you will see below in an example of our email outreach, along with the variables.
Subject: This is International Infection Prevention Week
Hi <<First Name>>
Since this is International Infection Prevention Week, I thought the readers of <<blog name>> would be interested to know that Kimberly-Clark Health Care is on the forefront of protecting patients from Healthcare-Associated Infections (HAI) and has put together a campaign dedicated to that prevention called HAI Watch: Not on My Watch.
We’ve created a site that has information for both healthcare professionals and healthcare consumers. If you decide to share this with your readers, please use any of the images, logos, videos, etc:
Please let me know if you have any questions and if you are able to post, I’d really appreciate it if you’d send me the link.
Thank you,
Barbara
–
Barbara Dunn
barbara@haiwatchnews.com
www.haiwatch.com
The email is all about brevity. It is also all about being clear with why we’re emailing and what we want: it is International Infection Prevention Week and we want you to blog about Healthcare Associated Infection prevention. Short and sweet. We need to have them at hello. If they’re interested, they can either hit “reply” and ask questions and do a “Turing” test — to see if we’re awake at the wheel, this happens a lot — or they can click through to http://haiwatchnews.com to see what we’re on about.
If you take a look at the SMNR, you’ll notice that while we never attempt to force feed a specific message to the blogger, we do prepare the copy on the SMNR pre-linked and pre-written in such a way that all a blogger has to do is select, copy, and paste into their blog composition window — and then easily add whatever else it is they want to say about the information. We realize bloggers are busy, so we try not to create any unnecessary hoops they have to jump through. When a PR professional posts their press release inline in the email or as an attachment, getting any photos, logos, images, links, or videos from that email to the blog posts is just more trouble than it’s worth for most bloggers and breaks the 5-minute rule by two or three times — and really tries the commitment of the blogger. [Originally posted on Agencyside.net, part 2 of 3. Read part 1]
Why Doesn’t Kama’aina Barack Obama Get Angry?
I am from Hawaii. Richard sees lots of similarity between the behavior of people he knows from Hawaii and the president — including me!
Maybe, however I also think it has a little to do with avoiding the “angry black man” label as well… sort of a hybrid. The question is, why would growing up in Hawaii result in such behavior?
Homelessness in Washington and Miriam’s Kitchen
Homelessness in Washington and Miriam’s Kitchen
I
just received a note a couple days ago from Ashley Lawson over at Miriam’s Kitchen — an email
sent to volunteers at their Washington, DC, soup kitchen for homeless
men and women; however, there’s some good general information and
interesting stuff for anyone who may be interested in the current state
of homelessness in DC, in America, and some examples of organizations
and kitchens that are working every day to help — and the people, like
me, who love them:
Guest Facts — So far this year (from January – May), volunteers have helped to serve a total of 29,515 healthy, homemade meals to our guests. We truly can’t thank you enough for your incredible donation of time and energy. Each of you make a huge difference in the lives of our guests.
As you may know, many of our guests sleep on the streets every night and many are battling severe mental health problems. The warm smiles and conversations you share with our guests are just as important to their survival as the nutritious meals you help to prepare.
In January, we administered a survey of our guests, and would like to share 3 facts with you:
- The average length of homelessness of our guests is 5.5 years
- The age groups of our guests: 18-29: 8%; 30-49: 39%; 50-61: 45%; 62+: 8%
- At the time of the survey, 25% of our guests slept on the street
If you would like a full review of the survey, you may view it here.
What Miriam’s Kitchen Needs — Interested in helping to serve our guests beyond your volunteer shift? Please consider hosting a donation drive to benefit our guests! Our top needs for the kitchen and our guests: ground coffee, small bottles of lotion, razors and deodorant.
Since I wanted to give you more context, I grabbed this from
the Miriam’s Kitchen website, www.miriamskitchen.org:
How to Help and How to Volunteer –
We are volunteer-driven. Just ask our 1,200 volunteers! This amazing group of volunteers put in more than 12,500 hours of service for Miriam’s Kitchen in 2008–the equivalent of having six additional full-time staff members!
We are always open to ideas for ways that community members can get involved, but here are a few ways you can help:
- Help Serve Breakfast — Breakfast volunteers arrive at 6 am and spend the next two hours chopping vegetables, flipping pancakes, baking biscuits and washing dishes.
- Help Serve Lunch — Lunch volunteers join us on Wednesdays from 11:30 am-2 pm and help prepare lunch, serve drinks and distribute door prizes to our guests.
- Help Serve Dinner — Dinner volunteers are needed every week night from 4-6:30 pm to help prepare and serve healthy meals to our guests.
- Help Prepare Dinner — Volunteers are needed on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 12-2 pm to help prepare recipes for our dinner service.
- Help Our Case Managers — Volunteers are needed to help sort clothes, hand out toiletries and interact with our guests every weekday morning and evening.
- Host a Clothing or Toiletry Drive — We rely on in-kind donations to provide our guests with clean clothing and new toiletries. Organizing a clothing or toiletry drive in your office, church, community center or neighborhood is an easy way to provide assistance to our guests. Please click here to our wish list.
Donate! — donate online!
- With a $25 donation, you will provide the food for a healthy, homemade breakfast for 25 homeless men and women.
- With a $50 donation, you will provide transportation to doctor appointments and job interviews to 40 homeless men and women.
- With a $100 donation, you will provide art supplies for our Miriam’s Studio’s Art Therapy class.
- With a $500 donation, you will provide one day of case management services to 80 of our guests.
- With a $1,000 donation, you will provide a healthy, homemade meal (breakfast or dinner) to all of our guests for one day!
- With a $2,500 donation, you will provide healthy meals and comprehensive case management services to all of our guests for one morning!
- With a $12,500 donation, you will provide a week’s worth of meals and services to nearly 1,000 homeless men and women.
Top Seven Best Post-War German Films
The Rosetta Stone blog just posted another one of my German-language-learning blog posts over on its Language Journeys blog, this time recommending seven of my favorite post-war German films — film being an most excellent way to immerse yourself in the German language, getting an ear for the language and, if you get the DVD, you can turn off the subtitles and go solo: German only! Anyway, please check out Top Sieben German Language Films.
