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.

Simon Owens has an excellent post over at Bloggasm, The Politics of Digg.  He gives an indepth analysis of how top “Diggers” use and/or game Digg to get high rankings.  It involves a helluva lot.  Relationship building.  Timing.  Persistance.  Free time.

It’s very much now a quid-pro-quo environment.  It’s people developing relationships over time to help one another’s Diggs.  While that may be obvious, the point is that for the top people on Digg, it has become IMPERATIVE for long term success.

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.

For some time now, those in social media have talked of authenticity. We’ve talked of transparency. We’ve said that organizations must engage their stakeholders and listen. They can’t just send out forced marketing messages. If they do, it will fail. They can’t be unauthentic or they’ll lose valuable trust.

We’ll say all of this in online discussions. On blog posts. In online magazines. In podcasts. On Twitter. At conferences. At TweetUps. Podcamps. Everywhere.

And you know what? I completely agree.

But we may be in the minority and it may be - at this point - impossible to do much about it.

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:

Disclosure: Philosophically, I’m equidistant between John McCain and Barack Obama. I like both. And I haven’t decided whom I’m going to vote for. I’m an independent and I’ve always voted for the person.

Okay…

When I say internet, I don’t mean the thing that was started by the Pentagon after World War II. Nor do I mean this great medium that we can do marketing on.

When I say internet, I mean the internet as a catalyst that’s causing huge cultural shifts in the way we as individuals and organizations present ourselves, from the way we communicate and the way we handle commerce. It’s changed. It’s a massive change, it’s a widespread change, it’s a permanent change.

Most of think of social media through our marketing lens eyes. As we should. That’s likely its greatest use. But the reality is that social media encompasses so much. Or more importantly, it will soon touch on most internal business operations.

That’s why I wrote that latest post. We seem, in our attempts to define it, to be actually inadvertently limiting it. Much of our call-to-change, if implemented, could result in ineffective disjointed efforts that lead to disappointment and even failure.

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’m gonna run with this concept of community for a while. I’ve touched on something that’s created a bit of a spark. In other words, I value the contributions people have made here and I want to keep the discussion going.

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:

One of the most sacred principles in social media is the concept of “the community”. It serves as the foundation of what social media marketers base their business models and methodologies on. “Engage your community” we are told. “Engage or die”.

Companies today are seeking to create their own communities, be they formulated around the company itself or around brands the company produces. Some of these attempts do well, others fail. Those that fail do so for a variety of reasons.

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.