Liza Peiffer, our intern, is interviewing all the members of the management team of Abraham Harrison LLC, starting with me, Social Media Marketing: The lovechild of work and play? With some thoughts from Chris Abraham and then moving on to today’s interview with our Director of Client Services, Some about one of our own, Dan Krueger:

After a decade of working on television shows you’d think a career shift to internet marketing would be quite the change.  However, Abraham Harrison Director of Client Services Daniel Krueger says there are certainly similarities between the two.

Dan produced, edited, filmed and directed shows for networks such as HGTV, CBS, TLC and ABC Family.  He says the profession allows you to either “feast or famine,” jumping from contract to contract when a show doesn’t cut it—which is more often than not.

But what happens when a show survives the grueling initial stage of winning over critics and roping in audiences? That’s when the magic happens, when the raw ingredients bake into the delicious dessert of a hit TV show.  Admitting he’s always been computer savvy, Dan says that this “conception to completion” mindset translates perfectly to digital marketing and especially to what he does for AH.

“The virtual realm is similar [to TV] because you’re taking clients’ ideas with your own ideas and bringing them to reality.”

So with all this vague talk about ideas becoming final products, let’s give you an idea of some of those projects Dan has been working on.  In the past 6 months Dan got English, Portuguese and Spanish campaigns up and running for the international classifieds site OLX.  He is now heading a new one in Russian and says it’s “pretty crazy to be managing campaigns in different languages.” Uhh, yeah it is!

“It’s completely different than anything that we’ve ever done, dealing with a language you don’t know,” Dan says. “It’s all about trusting the people you’re working with.” Trust is important in most if not all aspects of sales and services.  AH is lucky to work with such great people who make challenges like venturing outside of the English language a business reality. Just like the same TV crew can produce different shows, the AH team is able to execute services tailored to each unique client.

As the intern, I was asked to help with the OLX Russia Twitter page and follow some of the Russian community.  Let me tell you, they should change the saying to ‘It’s Russian to me’ because it was hard.  I couldn’t imagine producing a project in a different language, let alone one that doesn’t use our alphabet.   OLX Polish may also be in the works for fall … good luck!

Dan also works closely with the Fresh Air Fund, a company that gives inner-city children from New York the chance to have a fun-filled summer vacation with volunteer host families and at Fund camps.  He gets the word out to potential host families and creates a general awareness of the program by using a method Abraham Harrison knows oh too well–it’s the monthly blogger outreaches that help get donations, find host families and recruit counselors.

Dan says AH blogger and journalist outreaches are so successful because a media post “basically lives forever on the Internet” unlike paid ads that come down after a certain time.  “We’ve gotten it to a science, utilizing the blogosphere is huge,” he says.  “Everyone is their own journalist if they want to be.”

His history in TV producing and working in so many different positions shows Dan is an expert at handling whatever is thrown at him.  And because of this, AH is thankful that he is now applying such skills to Internet marketing—and that he left that other form of media.

Abraham Harrison, LLC, is a new media Marketing, online PR and Brand Promotion firm. We specialize in the ability to generate internet buzz around your product, company or organization. Using all forms of new and social media, we are able to translate your unique company message to the relevant online communities.

Jeremy Pepper just wrote a blog post entitled Can I can get a big cup of STFU please? that you should read.  The long story short is that  social media is just one part of public relations and that everything really hinges on relationships and connections:

The fact is that social media is ONE part of public relations. A SMALL part, if you are a good PR person or firm. The other parts are traditional media (while it might be shrinking, it still reaches that middle part of the country), analyst relations, events, and more.

Leo Bottary, SVP at Mullen, asked a pretty great question over on LinkedIn, What motivated you to learn about social media?  I took a stab at answering in my own way:

I am really proud of the work we at Abraham Harrison are doing on behalf of Jerry White's new book, I Will Not Be Broken: Five Steps to Overcoming a Life Crisis, and new organization, SurvivorCorps. So excited am I that we really created a gorgeous Social Media News Release (SMNR) for the project, for both I Will Not Be Broken and SurvivorCorps -- and I wrote about it over on Marketing Conversation. Via Chris Abraham - Because the Medium is the Message

Abraham & Harrison offers its clients comprehensive Online Conversation Marketing campaigns based on the core fundamentals of effective Marketing Communication techniques. We integrate Online Publicity, Online Grassroots & New Media Marketing, Business Intelligence and Search Engine Services to ensure that our clients’ message, the right message, is being portrayed in every corner of the digital space. Additionally, we offer our expertise in the areas of profiling, intelligence, forensics and crisis management.

Mark Harrison, CEO - Mr. Harrison's unique history of professional experience blends technology, education, business, and international affairs. Trained as a diplomat, Mr. Harrison has worked with UNHCR, the IMF, and the World Bank Group. He has served as a political functionary, technologist, and journalist in the US, Europe, Thailand, Israel, Tanzania, and Guatemala.

Abraham Harrison is a company of 22 people stretching across 14 time zones, and living in five countries on four continents. We are of four nationalities and six ethnicities.

Among us we speak not only English, but Spanish, Afrikaans, German, French, Hindi, Swahili, and Arabic. Our people have lived in the US, UK, Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Liberia, South Africa, Tanzania, Tunisia, Germany, Spain, India, and Egypt.

In this highly international, intercultural, interlingual company that is Abraham Harrison LLC, we meet on the internet and operate primarily in English - and we live our daily lives both on and offline within the constantly morphing cultural boundaries that is our modern cosmopolitan world.

Last week, Mark was contacted by a reporter from IDG who wanted to know about how Abraham Harrison LLC uses Google Apps Premier, and Mark Harrison, our CEO, obliged. The article was published online today, For Web Apps, Get a Service Guarantee, in PC World (via Marketing Conversation and Chris Abraham).

I will let my words speak for themselves, as published in this month’s Atlantic magazine in Lori Gottlieb’s article, Marry Him: The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough (gulp):

"Who the heck is Chris Abraham and how did he get to be such a * known quantity*? Check out his blogs (try www.chrisabraham.com) and check him out on Facebook. Chris Abraham has a lot more blogs than just the one and I checked them out along with his posts on Facebook and somewhere along the way the mention about his year-long moratorium on sex came up." These are the questions that Stevie Wilson asks me in a very intimate podcast interview that you should check out! Episode 1 and Episode 2. (Via Memes.org and Chris Abraham - Because the Medium is the Message, and -- of course -- LA-Story Blog by Stevie Wilson)