Thanks to Phillip Rhoades and the blogging team at Marketing Conversation, we have broken into the AdAge Power 150 proper, at this moment number 131! Where I come from, that’s a Christmas miracle! Thank you to Phillip Rhoades, Geri Casas, Anthony Marques and especially Robin Pangilinan, our new prodigious and prolific Wunderkind! This is sort of a big deal to me and to us at Abraham Harrison, (via Marketing Conversation)
While the Economist is calling what I do “my spiel,”
Here’s their spiel: the mainstream media—the traditional gatekeepers of news and the bane of the PR man’s life—are becoming less important. So is the worth of the advertising slots they sell, and therefore so are the sort of paid-for, hard-sell campaigns that the ad men and marketers deal in. Meanwhile social networking, with its cacophony of bloggers, Facebookers and tweeters, is becoming more influential. It is also confusing and hard to control. The public is becoming deafened and confused by a barrage of contradictory messages. Bernays’s maxim about the public needing trusted “influencers” to tell them what to buy and think is therefore becoming truer than ever.
Let me explain: my agency is not banking on a shift of power from mainstream media to bloggers and social media. I have little or no interest in any particular blogger’s or tweeter’s personal influence, though my strategies are not typical. I am interested in all of their voices equally. There is power in numbers. I am egalitarian and am not interested in becoming a King-maker online.
In fact, we embrace the chaos! Nobody in my agency feels like we’re the boss of anybody online. We also understand how scared mainstream media like The Economist are — they don’t really like the shift of control, can’t handle the fact that you really should not — cannot — herd cats. We have just mastered the art of making a can-opener sound loud and compelling enough to attract kitties from all over the neighborhood!
Abraham Harrison is banking on the disruption of the mainstream online, though not only online. Both worlds bleed together through the mediasphere. We’re banking on the dilution of the power once held by a handful of journalists, reporters, and anchormen. At least I see that there is a new and fecund seedbed that is so very fertile and so powerful that even mainstream media tends to follow the lead.
Mainstream media is picking stars from YouTube and they’re picking more and more stories right out of the trending topics on Twitter. We’re not banking that the social-mediasphere or the blogosphere will usurp the New York Times or the Economist, we’re banking — and experiencing — the WikiLeaks effect.
What is the WikiLeaks effect? Well, we’re watching the irrational exuberance of newspaper publishers in one giant feeding frenzy over Julian Assange‘s leaked content on his terms. Influencing hundreds or thousands or millions of bloggers, tweeters, and Facebookers en masse to school around a message, an issue, product, an event, or a passion can spur political and news decisions.
Actually, it can change the direction of the conversation. It can change the world. Seriously, this is not hyperbole.
I know this is yesterday’s news but it still hasn’t changed: each one of you — of us — has more access to tools that can expedite, influence, effect, and harness change than ever before. Justin Beiber and Charice Pempengco are the highest-profile example of going from nowhere to King and Queen of pop, but there are an infinity of examples. Perez Hilton, for example. And no, that land grab is not over. New titles are awarded every day. Blogging is not dead, it is hard. People giving up because something is too hard is not the same as something dying. All those tweeters and bloggers who have ceased blogging and tweeting are not reading blogs and tweets. They’re committed lurkers. They’re readership. Yes, even you PR and Ad men, you too.
In mainstream media’s desire to keep up and keep relevant, they have become indiscriminate and frenzied. There is a lot of opportunity there. Now is the most empowering time to actively participate in the conversation that is happening now online, happening every day on message boards, forums, Twitter, Facebook, hi5, Orkut, Second Life, irc, Ecommerce sites, blogs, email lists, and whatnot.
My agency and I are not depending on the voice of one blogger or tweeter, we’re depending on their choir of voices in concert. That’s what The Economist missed. The new media and social media war is not the war of the flanking Redcoats (MSM), it is the Revolutionary war: the mainstream media Redcoats against the social media Rebels. Not conventional war.
Mind you, Abraham Harrison offers earned media services, meaning that our messaging and outreaches aim to inspire folks online to seriously consider what we’re proposing with the goal of writing, tweeting, blogging, podcasting, videoblogging, sharing and/or Facebooking it.
Not one front directly opposed to another across trenches.
The mainstream media, including The Economist, is physically unable to see what is before them. They’re unable to even recognize what is going on even now. They’re not even completely clear that they have been reporting on news, content, events, and political action that has been influenced, steered, instigated, catalyzed, and propagated by communications shops the world over, from crisis shops to public affairs, from promotional agencies to social media marketing teams; from PACs to lobbyists — every day.
Personally, I’ve been herding cats by opening cans of cat food and planting catnip online professionally since 2003. Sorry, Economist, too little too late.
After over 4 years there are still people who believe that Abraham Harrison is a one-man band. Just me. Some even doubt the existence of Mark. That’s why I came up with an Abraham Harrison new years cars that collected the faces of just about the entire team — all except some of the shy ones. So, thanks to the tireless work of Sara Wilson, Dan Krueger, Mark Harrison, Phillip Rhoades, Rodrigo Martucci for collecting all the pretty faces of Team Abraham Harrison. Also, endless thanks to the mad design skills of Berlin-based and recently-married Richard Veenstra for not only designing our New Years card but also for designing our new logo (upper right) and for also designing every single one of our business cards as well. You really need to check out Richard and his company, The Lime Machine. Together with Frank Merfort, they do amazing music, sound design, video production and design work.
On the other side of the world, beyond the towering skyscrapers and the blaring urban noises, natural ecosystems exist.
In the seemingly minute but yet absolutely amazing realm of insects, little creatures like aphids and ants has a remarkable thing going on with each other. Aphids produce a sugar-rich substance called honeydew. This honeydew is a certified ant favorite and as a gift to their source of nourishment, the ants protect the aphids from their natural enemies by acting as the aphids’ own personal army.
This is mutualism at its finest. Mutualism occurs when the activities of two separate individuals benefits both parties in one way or another. Like this interaction between aphids and ants, the relationship between client companies and social media outsourcing firms are no different. Apparently, the latter is even more interesting. Why? One can be the aphid and the ant of the other, interchangeably.
An in depth discussion about the relationship between client companies and social media outsourcing firms has been highlighted in the recent debate between Chris Abraham, the founder of the trusted Social Media Outsourcing firm, Abraham Harrison and the Senior Strategist of BrandBuilder Marketing, Olivier Blanchard. The premise of this very juicy and interesting battle of wits between these highly renowned social media gladiators is Mr. Blanchard’s post in his blog; The Brand Builder Blog entitled Stating the Obvious. The statement that started it all is this question:
“Can you outsource your presence at Thanksgiving dinner to an agency?”
The obvious answer is, according to Mr. Abraham, “No, but you can outsource everything else.”
Mr. Abraham’s main point is that, brands and main companies should not carry everything on their shoulders. Mr. Blanchard’s idea of having real connection between the customers like having to shake hands with them and having real personal conversations with them is indeed something priceless, but inevitably, this is very ideal and consequently, already impractical. Ideal things are more often than not, unreal. So why dwell in an idea that is not absolutely a sure shot? Engaging into a business has actually no sure shots to start with. Every action has a risk to be taken; every operational decision has a room reserved for the margin of error.
Yes, it would really be nice if you can do the promotions of your own brand yourself, but with all of the other stuffs you have to take care of like enhancing your product’s quality or improving your manufacturing capacities, availing the opportunity of having marketing agencies take care of advertising your products is absolutely something you shouldn’t miss out on. It all boils down to trust. Instead of painstakingly trying hard to come up with effective PR for their own products, brands should just dedicate their efforts in doing extensive research and investigation of the PR firms they are interested in doing business with.
Now in the advent of the World Wide Web, social media has now become an essential part of products and services promotion. Because of this, the reach for promotions has gone from just a thousand square meters, to a worldwide scope. The fact that your presence can now be outsourced through the various social media venues shouldn’t be viewed as a boon, but rather as an advantage to further widen your coverage for products and services promotion.
Outsourcing your social media can take you to places. From what has Mr. Blanchard said himself, “Social is something you are, not something you do.” No matter how much you try to learn about one culture, you simply cannot acquire the set of values and the respective social paradigms of that specific cultural group. You will be just a stranger in a foreign land and a regular guest to these set of customers. Now, if you have actual residents to these foreign lands and natives of these separate cultural groups as outsourced social media PR firm members, you wouldn’t be fishing on empty waters.
Quote Mr. Tom O’ Brien, “It’s all about relationships and alignment.” and, in line with this, also a remarkable point by Mr. Armando Alves: “It’s better an informed agency than a clueless trainee.” The relationship between brands ad their outsourcing social media PR firms is a perfect example of “novo mutualism”. Both have a need that can be fully satisfied by either one.
The brand is the firm’s aphid, as it is the firm’s source of income and consequently, the brand can also be the firm’s ant because it renders more credit to the firm’s credibility through time. On the other side of the coin, the firm is the brand’s ant because it does everything to promote and improve the social presence of the brand; it can also the brand’s aphid, as it convinces more customers to patronize and trust the brand, translating to more revenue and more profit.
Obviously, it is a win-win situation. Choosing the right Social Media PR Firm like Abraham&Harrison to outsource your social media presence is the first step, and the basic ecological rules of nature will go on, and take charge to accomplish the rest of the milestones.
While we wrote a proper case study on our 2007 CAFE Standards public affairs campaign years ago, this is the first time I really sat down and explored one of my favorite blogger outreach and digital PR campaigns — one we did in support of MSHC Partners, RIP, and the National Environmental Trust three years ago. Thanks to the gang at Agencyside for publishing Case Study: Blogger Approach for Air Cover today:
Plenty of people out there are giving you the down low on how to manage your social media presence successfully, but that can lead to some serious repercussions! Improved brand coverage, more business, and worst of all – more work! No one wants more work and that’s all “more business” is after all. So for those of you who want to make sure you reduce your work load this year, I have these 10 essential tips for failing at social media business:
Only reach out to A-listers, because you want to make sure you have all of your eggs in one basket and that when they all turn you down that you have no recourse and no resources left to reach out to the B-listers. After all, who cares about the thousands and thousands of people that follow the B-listers. They’re all just B-people anyway.There’s no reason to rush a response. People online have all the time in the world. They are all just a bunch of jobless, socially inept, timewasters anyway. They don’t need you to respond in an hour or anything like that. A month or two should be just fine!Being online is just like being at home on your couch in your underwear. Treat every single interaction as if you’re just yelling at the TV. None of those people online are real and it’s not like they feel emotional pain or anything.If someone gets angry with you just threaten them with lawyers and knee-cappings. It totally can’t go wrong. Better yet, send lawyers to commit knee-cappings! Yes!Keep as much of the conversation in the dark as possible. Always start a phone call or email thread as soon as possible. Especially if you’re actually helping someone. If people see you helping someone then they might get the wrong idea about your company. They might think it’s a friendly and helpful company. That would mean more business and more business means more work! No one wants more work. Screw that.Never ever turn a support request into a conversation. Conversations lead to warm fuzzy feelings of emotional connection with your brand, which of course leads to more business! We already know from rule 5, more business is more work! No good will come of it!Always tell people asking stupid questions to google it. In fact be extra abrasive and send them a link like this: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Abraham+Harrison+LLC which is awesome because it shows them how easy it is to search for something. This way they feel the sting of the insult that much more. Huzzah! Less business and less work! (Also, all questions are stupid questions)Be as mean, curt, and condescending as possible. How dare these people bring their baggage into a conversation with you about your brand! Make sure to unload with some baggage of your own.Make sure to make a lot of promises that you can’t possibly keep. Make these promises publicly and often. Then come up with the flimsiest excuses to defend not following up. Examples include: “Corporate says no”, “We lost the paperwork”, “I never said that”, and “Really this is all your fault because blah blah blah”.You’re off the hook the minute you stop communicating so keep communication at a minimum. Only communicate in the most basic and simple ways. Most importantly, NEVER offer a solution, especially one that actually works. If you solve people’s problems then they won’t learn. . . learn to leave you alone so you can enjoy some peace and quiet that is! Solving problems can only lead to more business and more work! No one wants that.Well, there’s my extremely bad advice. If you follow these tips your social media presence is sure to be doomed, business will decrease, and you’ll have so little work that you’ll wonder how you ever had so much before.
This morning I wrote 10 Essential Tips for Social Media Brand Engagement but realized over the course of the day that I need to be even more explicit when it comes to helping you all engage most effectively with the denizens of the Internet, be it on blogs, social networks, message boards and forums, via email, email lists, or groups. Here are another five, all dealing with follow-through, accountability, follow-up, attentiveness, under-promising, and over-delivering:
OK, that’s it for now. For your convenience, I will include the original 10 Essential Tips for Social Media Brand Engagement below:
Here are the top ten things we at Abraham Harrison remember every day as we engage online and deal with global bloggers, tweeters, and Facebookers in the thousands over many clients in half-a-dozen languages. They’re social media engagement tips we have sorted out together as a team, added to things I have learned online since 1983:
Here are the top ten things we at Abraham Harrison remember every day as we engage online and deal with global bloggers, tweeters, and Facebookers in the thousands over many clients in half-a-dozen languages. They’re social media engagement tips we have sorted out together as a team, added to things I have learned online since 1983 (Via Marketing Conversation):
Wow! What a firestorm. In the several days since Olivier Blanchard wrote Stating the obvious and I shot back with Can you outsource your Social Media presence to an agency? there has been 71 Comments on The BrandBuilder Blog and and — gasp — 89 comments on this blog! So, I will be spending the long holiday weekend bringing together some of the most interesting commentary. Today I will focus on some of the comments shared by my CEO, Mark Harrison, since he’s smart, savvy, and passionate while not really being much of a blogger so this is rare and great stuff.
The first comment by Mark is about how our agency, Abraham Harrison, can and does run social media campaigns and blogger outreach campaigns on a daily basis, effectively and seamlessly, and also aggressively and passionately over years to powerful effect:
As Chris mentioned, for some of our clients, Abraham Harrison has been handling their social media top to bottom with business-changing results. Just one example from a client who called us in originally because they were getting steamrolled with negativity in social media and needed to turn things around before it killed the public’s and their investors’ perceptions of them:
In one year:
- From an average of 5-10 strictly negative daily mentions on Twitter to 20-50 positive daily mentions and retweets reaching an average of over 122,000 people and making over 270,000 impressions a week
- More than 20,000% growth of Twitter followership: from 498 to over 100,000 followers
- From 3rd most followed company in their sector to 1st, with more Twitter followers than all of their competitors combined
- Over 45,000 Facebook Likes (starting from 0) and over 37,000 active users. From an average of 5-10 daily interactions on Facebook to over 175 daily interactions, and over 55,000 impressions a day (and all of this growing on a hockey-stick curve)
- Tripled blogosphere mentions in 10 months time
And ROI?
- Unique Monthly Visitors for the client’s site went from 50 MM/month to 129 MM/month
- Client’s membership base grew from 500,000 to over 2 million
This is just one of our clients for whom we handle social media efforts – and not even the most impressive example, just the one I happened to have all the stats on hand for right this instant.
Yes, some companies should consider doing their social media in-house. They should consider doing the search and hiring process, finding the techies, communications people, creatives, project managers, researchers, division executives, and perhaps foreign-language specialists to do the all the work. They should consider what it will take to train up all these folks and build out the infrastructure to support them. They should consider the timeline for all this to take place before they have a complete, coherent, effectively-functioning team in place, and the budget that build will take. They should consider the opportunity cost of the opps they are missing while they are pulling themselves together, and the risk that even with all this budget and effort, they don’t really know if the team they assemble is actually going to be knocking it out of the park when they finally get to work.
And, as an alternative, they should consider simply hiring Abraham Harrison for probably less than the cost of the one top exec they’re going to hire to spend all this budget and fill up th office space with all the well-paid staff they’re going to have to house and resource. And… if they hire Abraham Harrison, they know they have a team with a well-proven track record of extraordinary success in social media operations, with the ability to operate globally in 10 languages.
And… it’s risk-free. If one day the company decides they want to bring it in-house, they call me up and say, “Hey Mark, it’s been great…” and we go away. Try dissolving an in-house team overnight to switch to outsourcing. Neither cheap, nor easy.
Thanksgiving dinners and wedding planners and analogies and metaphors here or there, we have clear facts in black and white: outsourcing your social media to us at Abraham Harrison with our proven track record is going to get results starting the day you flip the switch, and will most likely do it at a significantly lower cost, at a much higher level of efficacy, and at a vastly lower level of risk than if you opt to try to build a social media department in-house.
Mark also wrote a very similar thing over at Olivier’s blog I’ll share here as well:
Hey Olivier,
Thanks for firing up so much valuable discussion – both here, and over on Chris Abraham’s blog. Thank you for all your comments there – let me reciprocate with some of what I wrote there in response to your comments:
The long and the short of it is that, actually, a company can successfully outsource the handling of client relationships in social media. We’ve got years of results and clear facts that show it. I know it offends your theory pretty directly, but the facts are facts, and it simply works – often better, and at lower cost than companies trying to handle the social media work in-house.
It’s good to draw up guidelines to help companies find their way in this new landscape, but when reality runs counter to the rules you make up, you have to adjust them accordingly. The fact is that the real world results show your rule #2 to be incorrect. so you should adjust that.
[ . . . ]
Yes, some companies should consider doing their social media in-house. They should consider doing the search and hiring process, finding the techies, communications people, creatives, project managers, researchers, division executives, and perhaps foreign-language specialists to do the all the work. They should consider what it will take to train up all these folks and build out the infrastructure to support them. They should consider the timeline for all this to take place before they have a complete, coherent, effectively-functioning team in place, and the budget that build will take. They should consider the opportunity cost of the opps they are missing while they are pulling themselves together, and the risk that even with all this budget and effort, they don’t really know if the team they assemble is actually going to be knocking it out of the park when they finally get to work.And, as an alternative, they should consider simply hiring an agency like ours for probably less than the cost of the one top exec they’re going to hire to spend all this budget to build up a new team. Then they know they have a team with a well-proven track record.
And… when it’s outsourced to an agency like ours, the risk is vastly lower. You know you have an effective team from the first day, and if one day the company decides they want to bring it in-house, they can call up and say, “Hey, it’s been great… we’re not re-upping the contract.” and they are free.
It is important to create theories, and guidelines, and rules, but they have to reflect real-life results. The real-life results show that you can very successfully outsource your social media work and get the best possible ROI at much lower costs and lower risk than doing it in-house.
Your item #2 is not obvious. In fact – and in the face of the facts, it’s simply wrong. (And, obviously, #10 by extension is also wrong…)
Most of the other stuff though, is both obvious, and like most of what you write, right!
And then, after Mark got lots of push-back from Olivier himself, Mark came back to expand upon his thoughts:
Hey Olivier -
Did you miss the “ROI” part – right after the SM metrics I quoted?
And ROI?
- Unique Monthly Visitors for the client’s site went from 50 MM/month to 129 MM/month
- Client’s membership base grew from 500,000 to over 2 million
THAT’s what increasing their Twitter followership by 20,000% did for the client, THAT’s the dollars-on-the-table value tripling their blogsphere coverage got them, THAT’s why our getting them 37,000 active fans on Facebook is relevant.
Quadrupling the size of a client’s customer base is absolutely the “helping this client meet their business objectives”. Lordy, Olivier, what more could you want as evidence that outsourcing social media to experienced pros is indeed often a really, really good business decision?
And my aim in this discussion is not to prove that my firm gets results – our clients, and much of the business world know that. My aim is to move this conversation towards real-world facts and away from un-backed theorizing, arbitrary rule-inventing, and finger-wagging fire-and-brimstone preaching. That is what irritates and alienates the business world and undermines the credibility of our industry in their eyes.
The fact is, your Obvious Thing #2 – that you supposedly can’t outsource the management of your customer relationships in social media – is just clearly, provable, undeniably wrong, and stating such untruths as gospel and “obvious” hurts our entire industry. There are so many people out there in the business world who’ve come to rolling their eyes at “social media experts” because there is so much unfounded BS and from-whole-cloth blowharding going on in our industry.
Repeating faith-based untruths will never make them true, any more than it made WMD’s in Iraq true. All it does is undermine the credibility of the social media industry.
You are one of the voices out there who speaks very little BS, and I want to help the authority of your voice to remain intact by pointing out when you are preaching an untruth, so you can correct it and not lose the power your words have in promoting our industry in the broader business world.
Please, for the sake of the credibility of your voice, revise your pronouncements to align with facts and real-world results. Otherwise, your valuable voice will slowly erode to being one of those you warn about in your Obvious Thing #10: one not “fit to be consulted on the subject”, and that will not be good for any of us in social media.
OK, I will work on collecting comments from both side