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.

On behalf of the International Medical Corps and Abraham Harrison, thank you so much for all of your support over the last four weeks to get the vote out to help get the International Medical Corps into the top-five of the Members Project and then for securing the $100,000 from American Express, to be used to feed hungry children worldwide. Here's a thank you video blog entry from Paige Strackman, who was the PaigeS who submitted IMC in the first place under the title, Saving the Lives of Malnourished Children.

by Jonathan Trenn

I just read to intriguing posts on PR.  One is by Michael Arrington on, of course, TechCrunch.    It would be a great piece except that I disagree with his key point.

Then, as Chris pointed out, The PR Roadblock On the Road to Blissful Blogging.  Jeremy Pepper wrote something really special with Can I Get a Big Cup of STFU Please?

I figured I’d add my two cents here, somewhat separate from the above, but nevertheless related to them.

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.

I have been going through Google Docs and discovered an internal document I would like to share with you from back in the beginning of 2007. Taylor Donlan wrote it to explain to our new staff how best to reach out to and engage online on behalf of our clients and in general. I was inspired to share it based on this comment by Jonathan Crawford from the article What motivated you to learn about social media? Check it out and tell me what you think:

With all the discussion on what social media is, what it’s future will be like, who will control it, I often feel we fail to see the forest for the trees.

I see it as too diverse of a phenomenon to pin down with one easy definition. Its applications go far beyond the neat capsules that can be used to pick a particular department or function that should “own” it. Social media is creating, empowering, and accompanying a paradigm shift in the way we use all media.

I’m in the process of pitching a potential client. From what I see, if this works out, it will be an excellent opportunity. They’re a marketing service provider that offers the traditional services to their client base. The methods they use are still very much needed, they aren’t out of date, and they won’t be out of date any time soon. But in this era of digital marketing, those methodologies clearly aren’t enough. Not when the users of their clients products are more likely to look online for those very products.

I woke up to an amazing article written by Jonathan Trenn, The fallacy of community, and I responded in a comment to a pretty passionate article and a passionate comment string, and here’s what I wrote — and I have expanded the argument below, so it is an expansion:

Firebrand was a client of mine. I got to hang out with Firebrand’s CJ Lauren and tour the Firebrand studios. My CEO, Mark Harrison, and I eagerly watched Firebrand from Berlin — until the house went dark and Firebrand was forced into bankruptcy when all their investors bailed on them — and us! Well, like a Phoenix, Firebrand has risen from the ashes in the form of Firemedia Partners. Good luck, guys! Here’s the Press Release I just received in my INBOX from Shari F. Leventhal:

Saul Wainwright is the Director of Operations for Abraham & Harrison. Saul has worked for A&H for just on a year having worked his way up from OCM to Project Manager to his current position, Director of Operations.

Daniel Krueger is the Director of Client Services for Abraham & Harrison. Daniel spent the past decade producing, editing, shooting, and directing television shows for various production companies and nationally syndicated networks such as ABC, NBC, CBS, TLC, HGTV, Discovery, Fox, and others. Prior to A&H, Dan worked as an Executive Producer for The Electric Sheep Company where he headed virtual worlds projects for clients including the Emmy Award winning Showtime's "The L Word" in Second Life project, Bantam Dell, Ben & Jerry's and CBS's "CSI: NY." His background in television, photography, and his recent foray into online virtual worlds made a natural transition into internet marketing.

A big part of what my firm, Abraham Harrison LLC, does is online outreach and blogger relations. We’re doing our first book promotion campaign for our client, Survivor Corps, and Jerry White’s new book, I Will Not Be Broken: Five Steps to Overcoming a Life Crisis, and we have been having a lot of fun and plenty of success. We are very proud and excited by our work on this campaign.

A big part of what my firm, Abraham Harrison LLC, does is online outreach and blogger relations. We’re doing our first book promotion campaign for our client, Survivor Corps, and Jerry White’s new book, I Will Not Be Broken: Five Steps to Overcoming a Life Crisis, and we have been having a lot of fun and plenty of success. We are very proud and excited by our work on this campaign. Here are a bunch of the blog posts that we have been able to collect over the last few weeks of active campaigning of people and bloggers who have chosen to be responsive to our blogger promotion in the form of blog and forum posts (Via Chris Abraham and Marketing Conversation):