We have recently launched a new website for Business Furniture!

The good folks at Business Furniture had a solid list of requirements for their new site. Here are a few of them:

• Position Business Furniture as a thought leader in their industry
• Feature a unique, interactive experience on the front page
• Use bright, vibrant colors while maintaining a professional feel
• Better showcasing of their sales verticals: Education, Healthcare, BioSciences, Workplace, Professional Services, and Government/GSA.
• Provide a Knowledge Portal containing tools and resources

In just a few weeks, we were able to put together the web solution that you see above. This custom WordPress site satisfies all of their requirements, and then some. Head on over to businessfurniture.net and check it out for yourself!

Email marketing is changing fast.

At a jam-packed webinar last week, Raidious partnered with our friends at Delivra to shed some light on some of the top email marketing trends we have been seeing with our clients. If you were not able to attend the webinar, no worries – we recorded it so you can watch it at your leisure. Just click on the image below to see the webinar, or grab the slides!

Here are some of the trends we covered:

• Multiplatform
• Outside Outlook
• Email Anywhere
• Mobile Expansion
• Versioned Design
• Subject Line Trends
• Audience First
• Hub & Spoke Infrastructure
• Measuring Content
• Measuring Engagement
• Measuring Conversion
• Measuring Amplification
• Real Time Relevancy
• Multiplatform Correlations
• Email Content Strategy

For more detail on these email trends (or just to relive the magic), here is the full recording:

Lots of great questions from the audience are captured in the webinar, but not on the slide deck.

We had a fantastic time with all of the folks from Delivra, and got to see their awesome new office space. Megan Glover from Delivra and PJ Gindling from Raidious did a ton of work to get this prepared. Thanks to you both!

Also, thanks to Neil Berman, CEO Delivra, who was awesome to work with. Most importantly, thanks to everyone who attended or signed up! If you have more questions about Email Marketing or Content Strategy, please feel free to reach out and we’ll be happy to help!

Related articles

• Spotlight: Email Marketing with Delivra (marketingtechblog.com)
• Welcome Email Marketing Blog Sponsor Delivra! (marketingtechblog.com)
• Same Email Marketing Pains…10 Years Later. (marketingtechblog.com)
• Use Mobile to Acquire Email Subscribers (marketingtechblog.com)

Customer relationship management is often laser-focused on email and social media. reducing customers’ needs, hopes, and pain points to data points and milestones. These components are obviously crucial, but it’s to easy to overlook one of the most basic means of communication available to us: the telephone. Truly effective CRM utilizes the power of the human voice in direct, real-time communication.

Case in point: my car has been in the shop for over a week now. The nature of the issue required an insurance adjustor to look at the car, and special ordering some parts–each of which contributed to a longer time frame for repair.

Rather than renting a car, the dealership gave me a brand new loaner car to drive in the interim. While this alone would’ve been enough to satisfy me, it’s been the communication that’s made me a customer for the foreseeable future, if not for life.

Every day since they’ve had my car, I have received a phone call around 4:00pm with a complete status update. I have not for one day been left to wonder what’s going on, nor have I had to pester the shop for information. I have been proactively provided with everything I need to know, often before I have had time to think of it.

Of course, I receive regular targeted emails and paper mail offering specials and advising me of new features, sales and events. I also follow two different Twitter feeds related to the brand. These are both helpful and informative, but I know these means of communication originate from the corporate office.

My local dealer knows my name, takes the time to catch up on general life events when I’m in their office, and reminds me through their actions that they value me as an individual. I’m not a target demographic, I’m not an email address with a customizable first name field in a SalesForce database: I’m a person, and I respond to personal attention. And unlike most people, when they say they’ll call they actually mean it and follow up.

The digital realm isn’t the be-all and end-all in CRM. As this anecdote illustrates, humans respond to humans. Your customers, regardless of industry, deserve this type high-end treatment. Even if you are a huge retailer with hundreds of thousands of customers, when a customer service issue arises that person should feel that their patronage is appreciated and their needs are addressed.

So take the time to sit down and talk. Don’t make them wait. Remember to call. Your customers will remember why they became customers in the first place.

This week’s tip is for those of you struggling to manage your brand’s social media efforts on a daily basis, and finding that the work is time consuming, and monotonous. The solution is simple, “think campaign.”

In order to see the true benefits from managing your brand’s social media pages is treat it like any other marketing or public relations campaign. Start with research and planning. Learn where your targeted publics are located, and how they are using social media. Use that knowledge to create your plan.

Next, implement your strategy and measure along the way. Follow the strategy you set forth, but don’t be afraid to change directions when needed. Stick to your brand’s voice, but don’t be afraid to change your content strategy if you’re not getting the engagement or reach you’re looking for.

Once you’re into a solid strategy you’ll find that scheduling content in advance becomes easier, and if you’re campaign is done well, you’ll begin engaging with customers in an organized fashion that’s never been possible in the past.

If you’re current social media strategy is to turn on your computer and do a few posts each day, then it’s time to start focusing on developing a plan that looks out more well into your future rather than the next 24 hours.

REVIEW:

1. Research
2. Develop A Plan
3. Implement Your Strategy
4. Stick to Your Brand’s Voice
5. Don’t Be Afraid to Change
6. Measure

Upon a recommendation from our CEO, as well as its location on my “books I really need to read” list has lead to me to Sun-tzu’s “Art of War” — it’s free to download on iBooks, and while I’m not finished yet, it is something I recommend everyone read.

I explain this as I toss in this quote to introduce Mr. Matt Chandler, our Vice President of Advancement.

“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.”

Sun-tzu – Chinese general & military strategist (~400 BC)

This is as true in business as it is in war, and it is as true to marketing online as it is to traditional business. Mr. Chandler’s role on our team is to make sure our team and clients have the knowledge to ensure that we are always moving forward, always advancing.

Without further ado, here are five questions with Matt Chandler, Vice President of Advancement for Raidious.

Who are you, where did you come from?

My name is Matt Chandler, and I was born right here in Indianapolis. According to my parents and old family friends, I started talking at five months of age and haven’t stopped since.

I studied elementary education in college, and fell into internet work along the way. I’ve worked for Community Health Network, hosted a late-night free-form radio show, and was an independent concert promoter.

I lived in Brooklyn, NY, for three-and-a-half years and worked as a web manager for NYU Langone Medical Center. After joining Raidious I moved back to Indianapolis in early 2010. I also teach a college class in Web Marketing at the Art Institute of Indianapolis.

I was a music writer for Nuvo Newsweekly and IndianapolisMusic.net, and I’m a featured guest blogger for Marketing Tech Blog, Social Media Today and My Venture Pad.

What is Advancement?

Advancement is literally the act of moving forward. I’ve always found progress to be better than doing nothing, or even worse, moving backward.

In the business sense, advancement takes a number of forms. I help our clients learn how to work with Raidious, getting them familiar with our processes and platforms, so they can make the most of their relationship with us.

I also help clients learn some of the philosophies and tools of internet marketing, in the form of SocializeU, the training program I created. It includes everything from the nuts-and-bolts of writing for various web platforms to planning and execution of crisis communications.

Advancement is also a process that’s internal to Raidious, in which I quickly onboard new employees and educate them in best practices and the Raidious model. This ensures that every person who works for us produces the best quality work in ways that adhere to our philosophy.

It all boils down to what I call going from strangers to intimates. Along the path from first meeting a potential client to a contracted working relationship, we pass through several steps. At first we are strangers, and through both reactive and proactive means we become acquaintances. As we relate and empathize with each other, we identify business needs and motives, and explore ways to become partners. We then work together to brainstorm solutions and prioritize needs, reaching a deep level of understanding to become intimate.

This process of moving from strangers to intimates is crucial to doing the best work we can for our clients, and is the essence of advancement. It’s the same with clients, with new employees, and even in our personal relationships. Advancement raises the level of analysis from “Who are you?” to “How can we help each other?”

What are you most excited about for 2011?

I’m just excited to see where this business can go. From the beginning to where we are now, we’ve advanced beyond our wildest expectations. We always knew what we were capable of, it was just a matter of demonstrating that to companies.

Now the team has expanded, we’re working with some of the greatest brands in the world, and things only seem to be getting bigger and better every day. I’m proud to be a part of helping form this company, playing an active role in plotting our course. I always say my worst day at Raidious is better than my best day working anywhere else.

We’ve beaten the odds at this point: we’ve survived and thrived as a start-up business. And we’ve done it the way we know is right, under the guidance and examples set by our President and CEO, Taulbee Jackson. This year should prove to be challenging and fun, and I’m just glad to be a part of it.

Why should brands work with Raidious?

Working with Raidious is different than working with anyone else. We develop true relationships with our clients, based on mutual understanding and respect. We are impeccable with our word, delivering exactly what we say we will and beyond.

Every member of our team has a wide range of experience and interests, so we’re able to bring a unique creativity to the process. We’ve all spent a great deal of time working in large organizations, many of which are mired in the traditional ways of conducting business, trying to shoehorn those ideas into the online world. Raidious was formed in part to take only the best of those ideas and reshape them into something totally new and different.

Everything we do is designed for one result: making our clients look good. Obviously we want them to sell more products along the way. But we can turn every single interaction, every piece of content we produce into meaningful, measurable results that translate into dollars. They can justify the financial and human resource budget they spend with us because we tangibly demonstrate the return.

Plus, what we do is hard. Most companies don’t have the experience, the expertise, or the human resource capital available to constantly monitor and moderate what’s being said about them online. They are focused on doing the work that they do, not talking about that work. Who wouldn’t want a team of detail-obsessed workaholics who are dedicated to telling the world how great your brand is working for them?

How can someone jump start their content in a large organization if they don’t have the budget?

You’re either on the bus or off the bus. Saying you’re going to do a little social media or try to produce some content–video, blog, whatever–is like partial nuclear disarmament. You have weapons or you don’t. You’re producing content or you’re not. Adding the task of blogging and tweeting and whatnot to the secretary’s list of things to do isn’t going to cut it.

That being said, there are ways companies can start small and keep things manageable. It requires a commitment from all levels of leadership and management, and expectations have to be reasonable. You only get out of it what you put into it.

If a company truly doesn’t have the resources to engage in a full-on content campaign, at minimum they should have a website that is current and well designed. Make sure it’s search optimized and intuitive. Concentrate on what you want site visitors to do: the call to action. It should be easy for visitors to figure out how to go about buying your products. If they have to guess, they’ll move on to someone else.

Is there one person on your staff who can dedicate a few hours a week to social media? Have them sit down for 15 minutes with every senior leader and every manager and ask them a few questions about the company: its past, its priorities, its plans. Turn that into one 300-word blog post per week. You now have a store of constantly fresh content that will help your search rankings and provide unique, transparent insights to potential customers.

That same person could spend a little time at least setting up a Facebook page and a Twitter profile. A couple of posts per day on those platforms about the company’s activities, some active conversation with followers and fans, and you’ve got a least a minimal presence on the two most crucial social media platforms.

Of course, there’s much more brands could and should be doing. But at the very least having some sort of presence on those owned media platforms–a presence that is updated somewhat regularly and not set up and left to rot–is better than doing absolutely nothing. It’s what today’s customers want and expect, and you’d better be willing to deliver.

This week’s tip is quick and simple. Metrics.

If you are going to use social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to market your business then you must be able to measure your success on those platforms.

With baseball season about to kick off this week, all I seem to be able to think about is numbers. If you’re a die-hard baseball fan, then you know what I mean. We are constantly thinking about numbers, and measuring the success of our team based on those numbers.

We are below .500, but why? We look at Earned Run Average (ERA), Batting Average (BA), On Base Percentage (OBP), Home Runs (HR), Slugging (SLG), On-Base Plus Slugging (OPS), etc.

In measuring social media, we have statistics like Likes, Recommendations, Retweets, Replies, Backlinks, and so on.

Measuring the success of your social media strategy easy when you have the right tools, and it’s vital to know what you need to do moving forward. Therefore my new catch phrase has become, “You can’t know what to say until you start listening.”

On Monday InsideFacebook.com reported in-depth on some changes to the Facebook Like button. This is in relation to using the Like button on a published site. Basically, they are replacing the “share” button on sites with “Like” and “Like (with comment)”.

This means when you have this functionality installed on your site, and a user “likes” something, the user of your site is effectively syndicating your content directly into Facebook, publishing it into the streams of all their friends.

Let’s hope that content doesn’t suck, eh? The real world equivalent of this would be advertising to get people into your store, then handing them 150 flyers to go give to all their friends, along with a personal endorsement (implied, at the very least) of how great your company is.

You can’t get that with paid media. You can’t get it with earned media. Only owned media gives you this unique scenario where not only do you get to control the message, and the platform, but the credibility of the source is almost unquestionable.

If my friend says it is so, it must be true! I trust them. I confide in them. I have a relationship with my friends that brands–regardless of their budgets or their hip factor or their sheer will–will never, ever be able to replicate, because brands are not people.

What is an impression like that worth compared to buying a print ad (if it’s good enough I’ll see it online), or having a story featured on the local news (which my friends curate for me on Facebook)?

I would have to say it is worth a helluva lot more than any tactic a traditional medium–paid media or earned media–can offer. Plus, you can track each actual impression or interaction all the way through to conversion, if you know what you’re doing on the anlaytics front. Earned media and paid media are at best a guess, an approximation.

The Like button could (and probably will) become one of the top syndicators of your content, if you employ this technology on your site or your blog. What else are you doing to syndicate your content?

We have seen a lot of success with our clients on Reddit, as well as occasionally on Digg (hit and miss). Twitter and Facebook syndication works. We have also recently been working more traditional syndication into our content planning, as well as guest blogging strategies for brands and thought leaders.

Getting the content off of your site or blog and proactively getting it in front of people is critical to your success, and a Facebook Like button is a great start. Let us know if you need a hand with this, or other syndication strategies; we’ll be happy to help!

Raidious provides scalable content development solutions for brands. In order to accomplish this, we have purpose-built Raidious with cloud-based infrastructure. What does this mean? It means that all of our infrastructure exists in the infinitely connected word of the internet.

One of the most crucial parts of our business is Google Apps Premier. Google Apps is a suite of collaborative applications for business provided by Google that mirrors its consumer offering. Central to the product are Gmail and Google Calendar, but equally important to our business is Google Docs, a suite of document, spreadsheet, drawing, and presentation solutions. We love it so much, that we were featured on Inc.com in article about its application to business.

One of Google Apps’ most endearing features is not the Google UI or its user management capabilities, but its ability to disappear into the background of our business and operate as infrastructure.

While our IT staff supports these infrastructure tools in the browser only, many members of our team connect to the system through a variety of tools and platforms, including software solutions such as Memeo Connect, Apple Mail, iCal, Microsoft Outlook, and web-based dashboards, as well as mobile devices such as iPhone, iPad, and Android smart phones.

What this all adds up to is that all the project management, content development and collaboration tools we use are accessible on any device, at any time, from anywhere. This flies in the face of the old-school “mainframe” model still in place at many larger organizations.

Creating content for interactive marketing and social media engagement requires an agile team, and operating with Google Apps has provided Raidious with a nimble infrastructure at our core that we’d be hard pressed to work without.

If you’d like to learn more about how Raidious can apply our scalable content solutions to your brand, reach out to us via the form below.

On Tuesday, October 19 I had the opportunity to speak at the 2010 Masters of Business Online conference. The event was put on by Slingshot SEO and featured a number of fantastic speakers.

I didn’t get the chance to attend many of the sessions as I was getting some work done, but the highlight was definitely the keynote by Mark Roberge, VP of Sales for HubSpot. Overall it was a great day, and I met a lot of folks in person who I’d either not known before or only known online.

My session, “Creating a Digital Content Strategy: The Five Ms,” was well attended and sparked a great deal of conversation. Thanks to everyone who turned out, and to Jim Brown and Slingshot for giving me the opportunity to represent Raidious at this outstanding event.

Here are a few photos:

And if you’re so inclined, here are the slides from my session:

The website for the 2010 Masters of Business Online conference went live, signifying the opening of registration. I am a featured speaker, conducting a session on developing a digital content strategy.

2010 Masters of Business Online Conference

The Masters of Business Online conference is a one-day intensive conference focusing on utilizing the internet as a prime marketing channel.

From their website:

MBO 2010 brings together marketers from business and industries of all types. From Fortune 500 companies on the bleeding edge of innovation to small businesses breaking into the social arena, this year’s agenda is chock full relevant case studies and practical tips on how to use the internet as your best marketing channel.

How easy is it for customers and prospects to find your site when they do research? Are prospects connected in a way that convert their leads into sales? The web can be a powerful tool, but only if you know how to use it! That’s what this intensive one-day conference is all about!

At MBO 2010, you will:

• Learn how to maximize your company’s sales and leads with internet marketing and social media.
• Understand the relevant analytics to evaluate and test your campaigns.
• Create a bridge between your business’ brand and online goals.
• Connect with other marketing professionals and industry experts.

Other speakers include Amy Baker, Director of Digital Solutions for Fusion Alliance, Dave Morse, eMarketing Manager for Delta Faucet Company, and Ryan Mull, partner at Imavex. The keynote will be given by Mark Roberge, VP of sales, Hubspot.

If this all sounds like it’s right up your alley, read more or by all means go and register right now. It’s sure to be a day filled with great insights.