Abraham Harrison was named a finalist in PR News' PR Digital Awards in the Digital PR Campaign category for the work we're doing in developing new communities through online outreach for The Fresh Air fund.

Digital PR Campaign

• Abraham Harrison LLC - Building Support in New Communities Through Online Outreach for The Fresh Air Fund
• The Clorox Company with Ketchum Public Relations - Clorox Introduces Bleach to a New Generation with Bleachable Moments
• The Coca-Cola Company - Expedition 206: 365 Days, 206 Countries, 1 Mission
• Discovery Communications - LIFE Digital Communications Campaign
• Entergy Communications – Digital Communications Promoting Grand Gulf Nuclear Station's 25th Anniversary
• Fleishman-Hillard - Gatorade Super Bowl XLIV Campaign
• Hunter Public Relations - Hasbro Family Game Night
• JB Cumberland PR - Curious Chef: A Digital PR Success
• MS&L/Procter & Gamble - Tampax Pearl Outsmart Mother Nature PR Campaign
• National Association of Home Builders - Federal Home Buyer Tax Credit Public Awareness Campaign

Via Marketing Conversation & Chris Abraham.

At Abraham Harrison, online social media PR is what we do all day, every day, and have been doing for years. We're not an old-media PR shop trying to quickly jump on the new-school bandwagon, hoping we can figure it out (and making all the mistakes on your dime). We are a well-practiced team of 40+ professionals who work exclusively in the social media world. We're very pleased to put our skills and experience at your service to deliver the extraordinary impact new media operations can have when  practiced by true online experts.

We're completely confident in our ability to produce results with clients who wish to leverage online social media – we know our way around this space like few others. We secure you trust, endorsements, top search results ranking, and ubiquitous presence of message -- we can get your brand out in front of the world, right in front of the eyes of exactly the people you want to reach, driving your search engine and general online visibility so that your brand is ubiquitous in the  places where your potential clients live online and at the tops of search results – not only having your brand  promoted on your own sites, but getting them endorsed and promoted on the sites and under the names of  the influencers in the online worlds where your customers are waiting for you to meet them.

We do all of this by finding the people you need and mobilizing them to support your aims, be it connecting to decision-makers or activating mass support, we can help you identify, connect with, and mobilize the people you need to be supporting you on the issues that affect you. We can reach out directly  to the people you need to be in contact with or connect with entire demographics in the places they live online.

Abraham Harrison helps you manage your reputation online and protect you online in times of crisis. With the Internet, with its forced transparency and free, instant flow of information, communication and reputation crises can crop up overnight – and with the search engines, even a very old blemish can taint  your or your organization's image years later and on into the future. We can help you manage crises,  steering communications effectively in the free, open, uncontrollable online medium and we can help you  regain and maintain control of your reputation and image in the search engine results.

I few weeks ago, Mark Harrison, CEO of Abraham Harrison, took part in a think tank in Casekow, Germany, at the Corpus Operis castle.  The subject of Mark’s talk was how Abraham Harrison recruits, manages, and maintains a staff of over 40 within the loose confines of a completely distributed, global, virtual client services company.  Mark McMillan wrote this very insightful piece about Mark’s contribution to the conference over at the Talent Function blog: Virtual Admiration – Abraham&Harrison (A model for global workforce).

This week at Corpus Operis in Casekow, Germany, I had the pleasure of meeting Mark Harrison, the CEO of Abraham&Harrison (“A&H”). A&H is a global social media marketing and public relations company [see the framed video below for a pleasurable description of what they do]. The company has a workforce of approximately 35 people operating in 5 continents, 12 countries, in 11 languages, and on 1 Internet. The A&H workforce are predominantly independent contractors, completely virtual, and global. This emerging workforce model is not uncommon, many aspire to build a business like this, but it is unusual to find someone actually doing it. So, let’s hold Abraham&Harrison up to the sun and see what we can learn.

Mark runs the business from his endless summer lairs in Mauritius, an island off the coast of India, and Berlin, Germany. He runs the company with one of his best friends, Chris Abraham who operates from Washington, DC. The business is three years old and has an international client list full of names that you would recognize.

Since the beginning Mark and Chris have consciously shaped a company culture to sustain the business lifestyle that they want. Mark was taking a well-earned sabbatical in Tanzania. Chris had started a PR company and it had grown past the overwhelm level. He asked Mark if would help him run the business. Mark’s response, “Yes, IF you agree that I am free to live wherever I want. My freedom is what I value most. I’ll do it if we agree to run the company as a virtual company.” And so, the first seed of the A&H workforce culture was planted. Mark and Chris have worked hard, with their team, to establish and embody a culture that delivers results for clients while maintaining the lifestyle that the workforce WANTS. Here are some highlights to the A&H workforce approach:

All Accept that Freedom = Responsibility. With a virtual, contracted workforce, there is inherent freedom. There is no boss watching you. No one can see if you have showered, or if you do your laundry at 2:30 in the afternoon. The “virtual risk” is that workers will not work and that it will take a long time to figure that out. The virtual model requires workers who are self-motivated and who accept responsibility for getting the work done. The virtual risk is mitigated by the inherent pressure of being an independent contractor. Since there is no guarantee of a next project, contractors tend to work very hard. Actually at A&H, contractors tend to work too hard. This is a big concern of Mark’s and he regularly protects his contractors from themselves. There is no notion of a 9 to 5 work day but everyone is grounded in the responsibility for selling and delivering work.

Recruitment via Nepotism. Effective recruiting is particularly essential with a virtual, global workforce. Mark proudly relies on nepotism as a primary recruiting tool, “In our environment, our workers feel great responsibility for the people that they introduce into a project. It reflects on them and that produces a very results-oriented energy.” Leadership by Capacity (not by role). Mark and Chris have deliberately created a culture that emphasizes people’s strengths. Team members are encouraged to take projects and tasks that fit their strengths. At times this means that Mark and Chris step aside and let others lead tasks that typical executives would insist on doing. Since they leverage all cloud-managed business applications, the tasks of the business are available for everyone to see. There is total transparency to the work at hand.

Currency Awareness. The A&H corporate lexicon includes the word “currency” which has a different meaning than monetary value. Currency refers to each person’s set of prioritized value drivers that they want from their work at A&H. For example, someone’s currency might look like:

Team Member 1 = freedom, money, the opportunity to play and create
Team Member 2 = predictable pay, time with kids, no emergencies
Team Member 3 = power, respect, responsibility, trust

Mark and Chris make a point of knowing what is most important to their staff and they talk about it openly. It is a bit like how people throw around the Myers-Briggs identities [INTJ, ENTJ, etc...] to describe themselves. Currency awareness pervades decision making at A&H: how they assign projects, how they schedule meetings, how they communicate with each other, etc… The currency concept provides them with a roadmap to create a sustainable workforce.

Total Communication. We rarely get to see our digital co-workers. They live in our phones and in our computers. And aside from an occasional astronaut quality visage through Skype, we don’t have the opportunity to read body language. And global co-workers work when we are sleeping, or when we are bringing the kids to school. How do you keep everyone on the same page? A&H approach this by putting everything in the digital cloud. All calendars, documents, spreadsheets, project plans, go into the A&H cloud. Everyone can see what everyone is doing, and has done. And, they cultivate a cc / bcc / reply-all culture so there is a forensic record of everything. To make this system work, Mark and Chris make sure that they are very accessible to their teams. The most impressive thing is that they actually have an articulated communication protocol. This approach also presumes that people know how to leverage email-rule functionality so that inboxes don’t become overwhelm boxes.

“No-Emergencies” Culture. If a leader or client has a work style that seems to produce a steady stream of last minute emergency meetings, then it spreads out of control. If it gets enabled consistently, then it becomes a feature of the entire culture. And make no mistake, it erodes the quality. Mark and Chris work hard to mitigate this by embodying and enforcing a no-emergencies culture. At A&H everyone buys into an agreement that meetings are only booked with at least 1-day advanced notice and meetings should never be more than 1 hour. This policy takes discipline and it does require Mark and Chris to push back on clients on a regular basis. Emergencies do come up, but at A&H they almost always real versus personality-driven emergencies.

As you can tell, I am a big fan of A&H and their leadership team. They are living the virtual, global company dream in a real way. The conscious, overt crafting of a culture that provides a holistic lifestyle for its workers is an inspiration. Can large organizations learn from the A&H example? What happens when you design the company to produce engagement?

Chris Abraham, was recently interviewed by The Decoder in an article entitled In the Know With a PR Pro - Meet Chris Abraham:

Meet the Pro

Name: Chris Abraham
Title: President
Company: Abraham Harrison LLC
Summary: Abraham Harrison does the leg work for companies hoping to connect with their customers and strengthen their social media presence.   We help companies engage with bloggers, on Twitter and Facebook — in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and other languages — in their native cultures.

It’s Business Time

How did you get to be where you are today?
I studied American Literature in college, though I grew up the son of a professional photographer and exile of the NY Advertising world— an illustrator and, later, an ad man.  I was brought up with books, art, and photography and was making and selling images as early as 13.  When I graduated in 1993, the economy was tepid and I ended up looking for photographer jobs since I was a member of ASMP (The American Association of Media Photographers).  My first job was with Picture Network International, one of the first online stock photo services, offering images via dial-up.  When they realized that I had mad computer skills (from being a geeky computer hobbyist as a kid) they sent me to the image server room and I got my first Unix account, became a system admin, and earned my geek wings.  This resulted in a decade of being a geek, systems administrator, and programmer — which I was good at but wasn’t passionate about.

In 2002 I left it all and took a three month sail from Acapulco to Los Angeles and thought about what I wanted to be when I grew up.  I had been dialing into message boards and forums since 1982 and loved my second life online — really was as close to being a native denizen of the proto and current Internet as anyone I knew.  When I returned from the sailing trip, I discovered New Media Strategies (NMS).  NMS was one of the very first social media marketing firms and I halved my salary to get into there and I was home.  Every day I engaged with big Hollywood and NYC brands, products, and services, learning how to take all of the mad skills I had earned as a geek, a programmer, and bonafide virtual community member and how to sort out the best ways to engage and influence influencers online.  It was stupendous!  A few years later, I was poached by Edelman Public Affairs and brought on to work in their Online Advocacy team working on major PR and Public Affairs clients.

I hated what NMS paid and I hated working for a big agency so I leaped out on my own and started Abraham PR, which grew and grew.  Soon, I begged my best friend and experienced NYC fortune 50 media executive, Mark Harrison, retired at the time, to come aboard as CEO and we changed our name and incorporated as Abraham Harrison, LLC, in March of 2007.

What is one thing that you know now that you wish you had known when you first started in PR?
I wish I had known how closed-kimono the PR world was.  Mark and I assume that we can talk about all of our processes — our tactics, our best practices, and our strategies — and it won’t matter too much because there is such a big difference between knowing generally how to do what we do and actually having a trained and experienced team of over 40 online analysts, researchers, project managers, operatives, native in many different languages and cultures, as well as over three years of operations under their belts.  I mean, I can’t believe how black box so many PR and ad agencies are with their methods, their ROI, and their efficacy.

This sort of blogger outreach and social media engagement requires one heck of a lot of transparency and I fancy that most people online are a little leery of marketing, PR, and sales people anyway, so being perceived as less than trustworthy doesn’t help anyone.  And when it comes to clients, we’re interested in return business and long-term relationships, so the less black-box we are — the more the client knows about what we’re doing on his behalf, the better.  Especially when clients try to do it themselves and realize that blogger outreach and social media marketing can sort of feel like juggling while navigating a unicycle through a mine field.

What tech and PR blogs/publications can you not live without?
I read the AdAge blogs, but my big secret weapon is the Power150 lists of marketing, PR, SEO, and advertising blogs.  The gang at AdAge, which supports the list, offers an XML-based expert file that allows you to easily take the list of over 1,000 blogs on the list at any one time and import that OPML file into my newsreader.  I personally use Google Reader, and spend quite a lot of time using my RSS feeds inspire me when it comes to blogging or sorting out new innovations, new sales channels, and methods to increase and improve the sort of accountability and proof of ROI clients want more and more.  Actually, my team and I steal shamelessly from all the good stuff that the top 1000 marketing, PR, advertising, and SEO bloggers share with us for free.  (Check out http://adage.com/power150/ http://adage.com/power150/opml )

What’s the first thing you do when you get the office in the morning?  Or, how do you start your day off right?
No office.  None of us have an office.  We’re 100% virtual, and spread across 12 countries.  No commute unless you want to pedal over to the coffee shop. So, what I do when I get up in the morning? The first thing I do in the AM is make coffee and check my email.  We’re a global 24/7 shop and sometimes I am in NY or DC and sometimes I am in Berlin, but I check email, then I check servers (we have several dedicated servers) and then I check Twitter (@abrahamharrison and @chrisabraham) and Facebook (facebook.com/abrahamharrison and facebook.com/chrisabraham).  Then I check my Google Apps calendar for the day’s calls.  Then I try to read the papers (FT, NYTs, WSJ) and then peruse Google Reader and the folks I am following on Twitter.

Just for Fun

Home state: Hawaii

Favorite thing(s) to do when not at the office:
(What office?)  I am trying desperately trying to learn German so I study that and attend classes on Rosetta Stone and at the Goethe-Institut.  I love to ride my single speed Surly Steamroller.  I try to get down to the river as often as possible to scull but generally, when I don’t, try to go on a walk, a run, a jog, or haul all of my paper magazines to the gym, read them on the elliptical machine, and then leave them there to make them Not My Problem.  I love Netflix and movies and have been trying to watch as many German-language films as possible.  I blog for fun.  And love to read.

What’s the last book you read?
The last book I have read was The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest back in Berlin.  I picked up the first  book in the airport in Stockholm and the second two at the airport in London.  I gloated quite a lot that I got to read Hornet’s Nest way before everyone else in the US.