Please feel free to explore some examples of the work we have done in the form of our case studies.
Usually, reputation defense is about cleaning negative search results off of Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live; however, in the case of a recent international financial services firm we did work for, we were effectively able to prevent any negative mentions to even take root.
An AP article came out that wrongly accused a financial services firm of laundering drug money. The article hit the wire and was repeated over 600 times online. They reached out to Abraham Harrison to do a reputation defense for them. Luckily, they contacted us immediately after the article was published so we were able to completely protect the first 5 pages from any sticky web or blog mention at all.
Problem:
AP article incorrectly implying the company was involved in drug money laundering. The article was picked up and reprinted by 600 newspapers and many many news sites. The client and its CEO had very little to no web presence prior to the articles viral spread. This resulted in the first 60 pages of search results returning only this negative story.
Objective:
To regain control of the clients online reputation and to clear it of this negative and false information.
Strategy:
To achieve this objective, Abraham & Harrison needed to promote the presence of the client in the online realm with a goal of positive and neutral results dominating the first 3 pages of search results.
Tactics:
Abraham & Harrison launched a large and multi-pronged Defensive Search Engine Optimization (DSEO) campaign. This meant that multiple domains, blogs and Social Network profiles were created for both the company and the CEO. These sites were then populated with many positive and neutral articles which were then cross-linked and submitted to all of the search engines.
Results:
In a matter of 6 weeks Abraham & Harrison had regained the control of the identity and image of the client. The negative article no longer dominated the first 3 pages - only a tiny percentage of users read beyond the first 3 pages of results - instead the positive and neutral stories that had been spread around the web by the Abraham & Harrison team dominated the search results.
Problem: Firebrand needed as much blogger coverage about Firebrand Monday; the Monday after the Superbowl, Firebrand showcased the best Superbowl commercials. With only two weeks Abraham & Harrison needed to create as much conversation around this new and unique company.
Strategy: Abraham & Harrison focused almost exclusively at getting the A-List, marketing, advertising, and PR bloggers to post about Firebrand and its Firebrand Monday event. This was a personalized outreach that focused on conversations and personal relationships.
Tactics: It was a classic case of pulling out the Rolodex (or Blackberry) and reaching out to the connections that Abraham & Harrison have nurtured. These conversations and interactions were carried out over Twitter, Facebook, email and ultimately blogs.
Abraham & Harrison created 3 separate Social Media News Releases. One of these videos was created specifically for the A-List blogger outreach. It contained an exclusive video that A-List bloggers got to see before any one else in the general public: http://firebrandbloggerexclusive.smnr.us/
In addition to the focus on blogs Abraham & Harrison created a group in Facebook, sharing commercials and other gifts with members.
Results: Firebrand Monday was a great success with Abraham & Harrison securing approximately 100 blog posts. The group in Facebook grew to over 600 people in the course of two weeks. In a matter of a short period of time Abraham & Harrison was able to really create a fantastic buzz and real interest in what Firebrand had to offer.
"With Chris Abraham's audacious voice and mastery of a variety of blogs, feeds and social media networks, Abraham Harrison was instrumental in significantly raising the volume for Firebrand during its short but illustrious history."
Shari F. Leventhal
Partner
FireMedia Partners (Former CMO, the dear departed Firebrand)
CHALLENGE: The New York City-based organization, Fresh Air Fund, which was founded over 130 years ago, needed to place 200 inner-city youth with host families. There was just 3 weeks to create some buzz around the campaign and hopefully place some of the youth by August 1st.
STRATEGY: Leverage Abraham & Harrison’s existing relationships with bloggers in tandem with a large online outreach campaign using links to both the Fresh Air Fund website (www.freshair.org) and a custom built and designed Social Media News Release (freshair.smnr.us)
TACTICS: Abraham & Harrison compiled a list of bloggers that fit the desired demographic and geo-located target audiences. These lists were custom built out of existing contacts and universes of bloggers that Abraham & Harrison had previously collected.
The outreach went to bloggers that fit both demographics like Mommy, Daddy & Educational bloggers. In addition we target geographically specific bloggers based in the New England area – such as New York City, Massachusetts and Connecticut bloggers.
RESULTS: Abraham & Harrison’s efforts resulted in over 130 separate blog posts and many millions of eyeballs reading the story. Blog posts were secured on sites such as Boing Boing and REDBOOK Magazine online.
"Abraham-Harrison tackled an extremely time-sensitive project for us and got up to speed quickly. We were impressed with their expertise in the industry, ability to execute a plan successfully and willingness to listen to our needs and goals. Their work has made an impact on our programs already and has given a tremendous boost to our awareness efforts."
-Jenny Morgenthau, Executive Director, The Fresh Air Fund
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CHALLENGE: This was a two week, high pressure campaign focused on getting International Medical Corps (IMC) into the final five of the American Express Members Project $2.5 million giveaway competition. 1,190 projects were nominated for participation in the competition, Amex cardholders could vote for their favorite project, and the top five projects will receive a portion of the $2.5 million in grant money.
The challenge that Abraham Harrison faced was to take IMC, a relatively low-profile $100MM per year organization that gets all its money from government grants and had essentially no support base among the general public and activate a mass wave of support and votes for the organization - in two weeks.
International Medical Corps is a global, humanitarian, nonprofit dedicated to saving lives and relieving suffering through health care training, relief operations,and development programs.
STRATEGY: Abraham & Harrison has developed strong relationships with a large group of bloggers interested in humanitarian issues who in turn act as influencers in their communities of readers. The goal, as with all online influencer outreaches, was to earn these bloggers' support and their willingness to act as repeaters and amplifiers of our client's message, get their implicit or explicit endorsement, and motivate their readerships to action - in this case to vote for IMC in the Amex Members' Project competition.
Abraham & Harrison was in constant consultation with the client advising International Medical Corps on their message copy,their use of widgets, their posting of banner ads, and guiding their broader strategic decisions.
TACTICS: Abraham & Harrison reached out to close to 4000 bloggers across a spectrum of demographics. The Abraham & Harrison team reached out to these bloggers multiple times over the course of two weeks directing them to the Members Project website and the helpful, blogger-friendly Social Media News Release that made blogging on the topic an easy cut-and-paste action. http://internationalmedicalcorps.smnr.us/
Abraham & Harrison also turned to its strong presence on Facebook, Twitter, and several other social networks, building groups and messaging followers as well as the broader Abraham & Harrison community. To drive SEO and further traffic, every one of the over 150 blog posts was posted on Digg and several other social bookmarking platforms.
RESULTS: Within two weeks the team at Abraham & Harrison had achieved close to a 10% response rate to the outreach emails, leading to over 170 blog posts with more trickling in daily. Multiple millions of impressions were made, and given the permanent nature of blog posts and the resultant presence on the search engines, impressions will continue to be made into the future.
International Medical Corps was able to fend off challenges from those organizations in 6th and 7th place, finally finishing in the top five, winning their portion of the $2.5MM of Amex Members' Project Grant money, and for the first time in the history of their organization, creating a broad public image and public support base for themselves.
"Abraham & Harrison has been a tremendous asset to International Medical Corps during our American Express Members Project campaign. Their online strategy and outreach helped introduce International Medical Corps to many new audiences and raised our visibility during this time-sensitive campaign. International Medical Corps was written about in more than 170 blog posts.
"Abraham & Harrison brings a unique approach to online public relations. The worldwide web is a vast space, yet Abraham & Harrison has found a formula to reach out to target audiences, effectively raise awareness and get online readers and activists to take action.
"The entire Abraham & Harrison team has been fantastic. Each team member brings creativity and passion to the cause. Without a doubt, International Medical Corps would engage Abraham & Harrison for another campaign."
Rebecca Milner
Vice President, Institutional Advancement
International Medical Corps
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When a high-profile, controversial, international businessman decided to move from the corporate world to Hollywood as a movie producer, he realized that his past had followed him online. Since movie production depends on reputation and outside investors, he needed to make sure his Google search results were clean. Abraham Harrison's efforts resulted in the online reputation garnering a much improved image. The results associated with both the client's name and his company's name were both positive and helped reduce the negative results and image previously associated with the search term.
CHALLENGE
The client, a high-profile Hollywood film producer had a negative online image. Having formed a new movie production company with a new partner, our client needed to have his reputation cleared online to remove the false or inflammatory stories.
STRATEGY
To regain control of the clients online reputation and to clear it of this negative and false information. Abraham & Harrison needed to promote the presence of the client in the online realm with a goal of positive and neutral results dominating the first 3 pages of search results.
TACTICS
Abraham & Harrison launched a large and multi-pronged Defensive Search Engine Optimization (DSEO) campaign. This meant that multiple domains, blogs and Social Network profiles were purchased and created for both the company and the individual. These sites were then populated with many positive and neutral articles which were then cross-linked and submitted to all of the search engines.
RESULTS
Abraham & Harrison's efforts resulted in the online reputation garnering a much improved image. The results associated with both the client's name and his company's name were both positive and helped reduce the negative results and image previously associated with the search term.
We at Abraham Harrison oftentimes work seamlessly with client companies as a "whitel label" turnkey solution. When YouCast needed to connect directly with A-list and top-tier bloggers they came to us to do the blogger outreach and social media outreach on the behalf of Snapple Antioxidant Water.
CHALLENGE
The Youcast Corp. turned to Abraham Harrison, LLC, to gain access to the blogger community and to introduce Snapple's new product - Snapple Antioxidant Water - to the broader online community. The goal was to get as many bloggers to talk about this new product in the shortest amount of time.
STRATEGY
The first hurdle for a new product is to create a presence - to let people know it existed. Abraham & Harrison has relationships with many bloggers who have grown to trust the products and services that we introduce them to. Abraham & Harrison decided to reach out to many of our existing relationships and to contact and start conversations about the product with bloggers that we had not previously reached out too.
TACTICS
Abraham Harrison approached 10 unique demographics ranging from Yoga to Parenting bloggers. The need to offer a gift to the blogger is always a critical element of success in an Online Outreach campaign and in this campaign we had a great gift. We were able to offer bloggers several bottles of the new Snapple Anti-oxidant water. In some cases this was prior to the product arriving on local store shelves.
Abraham Harrison sent several waves of Online Outreach emails which resulted in a close to 70% response reate.
RESULTS
Our efforts garnered close to 80 blog posts across multiple demographics and helped create lively conversations in the blogophere comparing the Snapple product with other leading brands.
CHALLENGE: Originally known as the Landmine Survivor Network (LSN), Survivor Corps had outgrown its focus on land mine survivors and was looking to re-brand the organization to focus on all survivors.
This re-branding was launched at the same time that one of the founders of LSN, Jerry White, released his book, I Will Not Be Broken, which focused on sharing his experience and advice on navigating survivorship.
STRATEGY: The focus was placed on reaching out to those communities that already struggle with issues of survivorship - Military Veterans, Cancer Survivors to name but two. Using the book as a vehicle to promote the over all change in brand and the human interest story of Jerry White played critical roles in our overall strategy.
TACTICS: The campaign focused on Online Outreach, messaging thousands of bloggers and sharing the news and offering a copy of the book, I Will Not Be Broken, to every blogger who wanted one. In addition to our Online Outreach we focused on building a presence on social networks, creating profiles, groups, and pages. Finally, the campaign heavily utilized Twitter and Facebook to message thousands of friends and followers on a daily basis.
RESULTS: The campaign met with huge amounts of positive response with 130 blogs posts and book reviews written and posted. Changing a brand is never an easy thing and is not done overnight, for this reason Abraham & Harrison was very excited to retain Survivor Corps over a longer term contract enabling us to continue building up a presence in the social media space.
"Abraham & Harrison has been a critical catalyst for the online debut of SURVIVOR CORPS. They helped us create a blogging buzz around the launch of Survivor Corps, offering savvy counsel on strategically targeted audiences who would resonate with our mission. A&H cleverly leveraged the release of my book -- I Will Not Be Broken: Five Steps to Overcoming a Life Crisis -- to generate word of mouth promotion online and cultivate new supporters for our work to help survivors of war in the United States and abroad. Abraham & Harrison will jump into a campaign with passion and panache. They've been responsive to our needs and a pleasure to work with from day one." -- Jerry White, Co-Founder and Director, Survivor Corps"
-- Jerry White, co-founder of Survivor Corps
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