Connecting with your Customer Community…
…can generate 64% more revenue and make your programs more profitable.
(Harvard Business Review, 2006)
The Globe and Mail has a great piece today on Business’ top five green tips and we’ve contributed a tip!
This is part of our larger and ongoing efforts at minimizing our environmental impact, which includes purchasing some carbon offset credits. We’ll have more on that later!
Ladies and Gentlemen, yesterday the web changed. At their F8 developer conference in San Francisco, Mark Zuckerberg and a few colleagues from Facebook got up on stage and announced a number of changes and features that promise to overhaul the very fabric of the world wide web. This is not hyperbole. This is fact.
What’s unclear is whether the changes are good or bad for the health of the web. It’s way too early to guess how this will play out. I can say with certainty though, that Facebook is about to get a whole lot bigger and more important. Just how big is Facebook already? They have nearly half a *billion* active users, and their rate of growth is accelerating.
This post deals with Open Graph, one of a handful of announcements made yesterday. In future posts, we’ll look at Community Pages and their implications. Open Graph is a new set of APIs and plugins that will allow every site on the web to enable Facebook features, such as clicking a “like” button, or seeing your friend’s activities on the site you’re visiting. READ MORE
Toronto, April 13, 2010 – Environics Communications has earned the #1 ranking on the list of Canada’s 75 Best Workplaces. Generated by the Great Place to Work® Institute using a unique employee survey approach, the 2010 “Best Workplaces in Canada” list was published today in The Globe and Mail.
“We are honoured to be recognized as the number one workplace in Canada by the Great Place to Work Institute, particularly because of the strong voice given to employees in their selection process,” says Bruce MacLellan, president of Environics Communications. “A trusting and supportive workplace is deeply engrained in our firm and is a major competitive edge in our success in serving our clients.”
The Great Place to Work model is based on the concept that a great workplace is measured by the quality of three interconnected relationships within the work environment: the relationship between employees and management; the relationship between employees and their jobs/organization; and the relationship between employees and other employees. READ MORE
Toronto, ON – March 31, 2010 – Sequentia Environics is pleased to announce that as of April 6, Adrienne Down Coulson will join the company as president. An established and respected executive in the Canadian digital marketing industry, Down Coulson will be responsible for leading the company’s expansion into new markets, refining its content, community and digital marketing analytics practices, and driving ongoing development of intellectual property and software offerings.
“Adrienne is recognized in the digital marketing industry as a leader who strengthens operations, drives delivery of new services, and has a proven ability to take organizations to their next level,” said Jen Evans, founder and chief strategist, Sequentia Environics. “Her deep background in digital marketing, lead generation and communities, combined with an unwavering dedication to delivering results, are exactly what Sequentia Environics needs to capitalize on our current and emerging market opportunities. Tapping into Adrienne’s business expertise was an easy decision to make.” READ MORE
It’s a remarkable time to be a marketer. Lately, our conversations with clients contain an increasing amount of confusion about a shifting industry, questions about what technologies are important to various types of marketers, what works, what doesn’t, and the most likely future landscape.
We are lucky to work with an exceptionally interesting and diverse group of clients, so when there is a common theme in our conversations with them, we know there is room for informative, useful content that can help them make decisions and guide investments in their marketing infrastructure and tactics. From mass adoption of social networks to mobile apps to marketing automation and the ever shifting and fragmenting world of online media, flux and shift are the keywords of the digital era.
Today we launch a new series of articles that reflect our thinking on the intersection of technology and marketing, based on a content model that reflects how we feel the world of marketing content and collateral will evolve. Three things you need to know:
We welcome your feedback on the series and ideas for future articles.
The flash mob and social firestorm can be considered a risk for any major brand actively engaging online. Examples from Motrin to Amazon to Dominos have gotten huge coverage in both marketing trade media and the mainstream media as the social media fear machine kicks into high gear.
In other words, we seem to be living in an environment where information, misinformation, and emotional reactions can spread like wildfire. Brands, brand managers, and communications executives alike struggle with how to adapt to this changeable environment. READ MORE
I was having dinner recently with some very smart internet people and talking about methodologies and approaches, and the importance of information in the internet experience. One of them said to me “People don’t want all that stuff, they want fun experiences, not information.”
What he really meant was “they don’t want advertising”.
And it’s true, advertising is generally unwanted, unless you are in advertising or marketing and consume it for professional reasons, if you’re a pop culture junkie and enjoy how advertising reflects the state of a society, an economy, its values and mores, OR - you have a need for the product or service that is being advertised. If you’re planning a vacation to Los Cabos, information on Los Cabos is highly relevant and interesting to you, and something you would likely act on.
Companies spend millions bringing traffic to their websites. But only 5-15% of your audience is ever going to be ready to conduct a transaction or indicate they’d like someone to call them off a first visit. So what happens to that remaining 85-95% of visitors, who may be looking for information or conducting research?
Currently most organizations do a poor job of understanding what people are trying to do when they come to their online properties. Are you asking your visitors to fill out complex forms or join your social network so you can continue to communicate with them? Make it easy and make it convenient, and you’ll get the chance to continue to talk to them. READ MORE
A word we’ve been thinking about a lot at Sequentia Environics recently is disintermediation. It’s happening everywhere. The social web has made it possible to go direct to customers for everything from transactions, to insight, to content.
Music has been through the convulsions. Publishing is experiencing it now. What industry is going to be next to experience the shift of disintermediation? The recession may be what pushes old advertising models into obsolescence. The power of interest-targeted advertising (search) and direct to consumer communications (through digital tools and channels including social media) are changing the way that companies communicate with their customers and prospects. READ MORE
If you could have your customers opt-in to receive information by whatever means when they are looking to buy, why wouldn’t you? People who are very interested in mouthwash tend to buy and use a lot of mouthwash. Don’t you want your most interested, active customers engaged with you? The bottom line is it will sell more mouthwash. But you have to deliver when you’re involved in that relationship, you need to educate or entertain, or lose the trust and attention of your audience. The reality is that most marketing is so bad, when marketing is good, people will opt-in to receive it just for the novelty. READ MORE
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