Greetings masters of coding!

I must begin by noting that I am fairly new to all of this, but I learn quickly and appreciate any advice. I am in my second quarter of C/C++ programming and I ran into this little doozy.

What seemed simple enough, I was tasked with writing a program that reads in state abbreviations and spits out the state names. No looping necessary, just a simple if, else if-type program.

I am sure that there are many ways to write this little guy, but this even stumped my professor and together we couldn't find fault in the code. I ran it on visual studio 6 and bloodshed dev, but was receiving the same output.

I even put it a cout to make sure that the characters (string) were reading into the declared variable and it was! However, the if statements were not working. I also took out the || (or) statement to simplify things and it still passes the entire run of if statements and simply prints the last else statement.

I am not requesting a different way to write it, I was hoping for knowledge as to why this would not work. On a side not, I was getting that weird auto-close thing, but I assume that is a setting in bloodshed and simply put a system("PAUSE") in there to alleviate it.

Here we go:
Code:
#include <iostream>
// #include <string> I tried including this, but it didn't change things
using namespace std;
//State Abbreviations



int main()
{
	const int SIZE = 3; //Setting the array size
	char abb[SIZE];

	//Get State abberviation
	cout<<"Enter in your state abbreviation ---->";
	cin>>abb;

	//Begin if statement checking for the upper or lower case entry
	if ((abb == "NC")||(abb == "nc"))
		cout<< "Your state is North Carolina\n";
	else if ((abb == "SC" ) || (abb == "sc"))
		cout<< "Your state is South Carolina\n";
	else if ((abb == "GA" ) || (abb == "ga"))
		cout<< "Your state is Georgia\n";
	else if ((abb == "FL" ) || (abb == "fl"))
		cout<< "Your state is Florida\n";
	else if ((abb == "AL" ) || (abb == "al"))
		cout<< "Your state is Alabama\n";
	else cout << "You have entered an incorrect value";
	
	system ("PAUSE");
	return 0;
}
Many thanks for any help.