Integrating Salesforce + GroupSwim + web design for complete customer lifecycle experience

Last week I visited with a potential sales partner about Intellicore Design solutions.  Among the topics, I discussed how we saw our business automation, collaboration, and web design solutions integrating together.  Said another way, Salesforce, GroupSwim and web design/eCommerce.

Knowing that a picture is worth a thousand words, I drew a diagram for our prospective sales partner.  Then this weekend, I listened to a fabulous video presentation by David Armano, VP of experience design with Critical Mass, on Thinking Visually, The Movie and it spurred my thinking to post a copy of the sketch in Big Cat Chronicles.

This is just a sketch, and not a fancy graphic, but it gets the job done.  So here it is, the our world view of our solutions.

Click to enlarge

Social media is about more than marketing

I watchlist a variety of blogs and articles about social media because Intellicore Design Consulting is building part of our consulting practice around offering community solutions.

What strikes me is that the focus in mostly on making marketing initiatives for (again mostly) B2C businesses.

And that’s a great way to use social media.  However, social media outreach is about so much more than marketing.  It’s about forging connections and collaboration.

Community venues like Facebook and MySpace and their corporate equivalents might get most of the press but, in my mind, they’re only one piece of the social media environment – and of the least value to most B2B businesses.

What sort of community and collaboration do most B2B businesses really need?  Let’s dish...

Read More

2009 Top Marketing Trends – Social media conflicts

The Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG) released the second annual Top Marketing Trends, conducted by Anderson Analytics, and they discovered what I think are conflicting results.

High ranking marketing muckity mucks are renewing their focus on the basics and are sick of hearing about the Web 2.0. 

Huh. That's kind of silly. How can you be sick of something that will help you extend the basics and give you more oomph? ...

Read More

4 tips for building strong customer relationships using online communities

The Internet is a good news bad news invention.  The good news is that is gives companies greater outreach than we’ve ever had before and that’s beneficial either to provide or acquire services and products.  The bad news about the Internet, though, is that it can create a lot of clutter.

To ensure your company and its messages are heard, you need a strong foundation that will allow your company to rise above the clutter.  There are a number of strategies to accomplish this goal but, in my mind, the foundation requires a strong relationship with your customers and prospects.

One approach to construct this foundation is via online communities.  Let’s talk about how....

Read More

Speaking of the cumulative power of blogging

Just two weeks ago, I blogged about the real value of B2B blogging and today I want to revisit the topic after seeing an interesting phenomenon in one of my blogs.

It’s one of my personal blogs but it still illustrates a point.  See, in the blog in question (not this one!), I’ve been stacked up this week and failed to post.  Imagine my surprise, though, to pop into my web statistics and discover a great week of visitations anyway.

Here's why...

Read More

The real Value of B2B blogging

Last week, I had a pleasant exploratory chat with a potential blog service partner and they get the point of corporate or B2B blogging – and it’s not the same as B2C or personal blogging.  In the corporate world, using a blog to build community is only one benefit – and in my mind, it’s valuable but not the most important reason to blog.

Let’s talk today about the real value of B2B blogging and the reason behind that value.  From there, we’ll segue into a realistic overview of the time requirements needed to build a successful blog. 

The discussion will help you put your own company’s situation into perspective when considering whether blogging is the right avenue for your company to build community...

Read More

Spend marketing dollars effectively during a trashed economy

Where are companies investing their marketing dollars as the economy turns down?  Two blogs in my reading list posed this question recently.  One is Jeremiah Owyang and the other Marketing Sherpa.

Their posts stimulated my own post on where companies are likely to gain the greatest bang for their marketing bucks and why.

To set the stage, we'll start with some wake-up results from Marketing Sherpa and then I'll segue into  answering some where and why questions posed by Jeremiah...

Read More

Tooty tooting -- Three Spheres of Web Strategy

Jeremiah Owyang, senior analyst at Forrester Research, authors an interesting blog called Web Strategy by Jeremiah.  I like peeking in on his articles because they focus on how companies can use web tools to connect with their customers.  A topic near and dear to us over here at Community Network.

One of Jeremiah's articles from last August focused on The Three Spheres of Web Strategy, complete with a cool graphic that shows the overlapping relationship among the spheres...

Read More