Author: artkade

Keeping Pace in a Changing Industry

The marketing world is changing. And fast. New media outlets continue to emerge. Audience segmentation requires constant examination. Deadlines are shrinking and products are being launched at record speed. Marketing departments are struggling just to keep up with these industry trends – without the pressures of hiring freezes and budget constraints.

Aquent understands these challenges. We’re the only global staffing company committed to marketing and creative services. We can help you improve your capacity to execute marketing programs and keep pace in this ever-changing industry.

SOLUTIONS THAT ENHANCE MARKETING AND CREATIVE SERVICES DEPARTMENT OPERATIONS

Staffing

Hiring talent on a contract basis allows marketing organizations to easily staff up or down depending on workload, without any long-term commitments. In a rapidly changing industry, Aquent’s talent has the diverse skill sets and expertise needed to impact virtually any marketing project.

When interim needs have the potential to become permanent, our Talent Bridge allows companies to try out candidates for 90 days to see how they meet expectations. If there is a match, an organization can add a proven member to its team. If not, there are no obligations.

Consulting

Managing creative services resources efficiently and effectively is the focus of Aquent Consulting. We partner with clients to assess, benchmark and redesign organizations, processes and systems to maximize marketing program execution.

Outsourcing

Free your internal teams to focus on your most strategic initiatives, by outsourcing the execution of content, print, Web and video projects to Aquent Studios. Our teams can scope, manage and perform the work on-site, offsite or offshore.

Training and Support

Aquent Graphics Institute (AGI) provides the technical training marketing and creative organizations need to succeed. Our expertise includes print Web, video, and mobile content using Adobe, Apple and Quark software. We offer private and custom training, along with regularly scheduled open enrollment classes, plus post-training support.

On-Demand Marketing Tools

Our affordable Web-based productivity tools make short work out of managing marketing resources, schedules and deliverables. RoboHead is a marketing project management tool that helps increase productivity, while MajorTom provides digital asset management, giving companies an easy way to manage their brands over the Web.

Multilingual Communications

Whatever the project, our translation, localization and interpretation services adapt your products to markets around the world. We offer multilingual solutions across all industries.

Executive Search

Aquent’s retained executive search services are available through RitaSue Siegel Resources, which specializes in the placement of design and design management professionals. Our areas of expertise include branding, communications, advertising, interactive media, user experience, research and planning, product innovation, packaging and store design.

Web Content Management Delivered as Software-as-a-Service: Manage Content Not Technology

CrownPeak is defining the future of content management by giving online marketers and website managers total control over their websites.

Online marketing revolves around the Web, and the Web revolves around content. Having the right Web content management solution ensures that you can quickly and easily create, edit, manage and publish Web content for all of your online marketing efforts. Such a system also enables you to streamline online campaigns and assists marketers with things they don’t typically associate with a CMS such as landing pages, microsites, search engine optimization, content relevance, and lead management and nurturing.

MANAGE CONTENT NOT TECHNOLOGY

CrownPeak is cost-effective and easy to implement, making it a natural choice for marketers. Because it’s delivered as software-as-a-service, there’s no software to install, no hardware to buy and no infrastructure to manage; you simply access the CMS through your Web browser. This means that your websites and online campaigns are up and running faster, with less technology roadblocks, and at a fraction of the cost of using traditional installed solutions or open source solutions.

WORLD-CLASS PRODUCT

With the CrownPeak CMS, you get the same features and functionality you get with much higher-end installed systems – just faster and cheaper. Features like complete system auditing and reporting to give you the ability to manage and track the history of all your work. Files can be given a full document lifecycle, including checkin and check-out, versioning, rollback, approvals, scheduling and completely configurable workflows. Combine this with an easy-to-use, awardwinning interface designed for the nontechnical user, and the result is quite simply the fastest, most economical and easiest way to manage your Web content.

LIFE AFTER LAUNCH

The real work of managing any website or marketing campaign begins after it goes live – thanks to the fact that change is a constant on the Web. Your CMS needs to be as flexible as your organization, whether it’s a simple template change or an entire site redesign. Thus, when you engage with CrownPeak, you get more than world-class software; all of our customers receive a dedicated account manager as part of the software subscription fee. This dedicated account manager is not only there to assist with the implementation of the software, but also serves as an extension of your team for the life of the contract to help with the inevitable change that accompanies any marketing effort.

For more information, please visit www.crownpeak.com or contact us directly at 800.887.1944 or sales@crownpeak.com.

OpinionLab: Providing the Leading Online ‘Voice of the Customer’ Business Solutions

OpinionLab® – the leading online Voice of the Customer business solution provider – employs a patented methodology to empower you to engage, support and understand your customers at every online touch point and to convert customer voice data into timely and actionable business intelligence.

OnlineOpinion®, OpinonLab’s flagship solution, enables you to easily collect page-specific quantitative and qualitative customer feedback in real time. A robust suite of reporting dashboards categorizes and analyzes customer voice data to deliver expertise that highlights key findings and recommends change. Near real-time Alerts can be disseminated to internal stakeholders to ensure that you are the first to know about issues and opportunities.

OpinionLab solutions will help you increase customer retention, foster customer loyalty and build your brand.

Operating on more than 3,000 websites in more than 30 languages, OpinionLab’s patented solutions provide a powerful strategic advantage to many of the world’s most prominent websmart organizations in industries ranging from government to retail. Since 1999, OpinionLab has collected, sorted, visualized and analyzed millions of quantitative and qualitative Voice of Customer data points for its customers.

BUSINESS SOLUTIONS

OpinionLab offers the following types of solutions:

Website Optimization

• Allow Web users to provide continuous feedback on content, design and usability.
• Identify best- and worst-performing pages.
• Benchmark your website against your industry.
• Be the first to know about business intelligence for competitive, product or customer service opportunities.

Advanced Online Surveys

OpinionLab solutions enable you to easily and cost-effectively produce and publish online surveys from your web browser.

Online Advertising

• Minimize negative impact of hosted advertising on customer retention.
• Optimize ad messaging and placement to create positive brand equity.

Business Intelligence

OpinionLab solutions enable you to gain a better understanding of what customers need in terms of improved service levels as well as help you retain customers.

Intelligent Support™

This OpinionLab solution enables you to maximize opportunities to retain customers through real-time intervention.

Distributed Products

OpinionLab solutions let you monitor users’ experiences with distributed products (such as mobile, gadgets, widgets and software) – data that can then be used as the basis for product improvement.

HiveLive Inspires Brand Loyalty in Customers

In an era of highly informed, plugged-in, web-savvy consumers, it’s no longer possible to “spin” your way into minds and hearts. Today’s companies need authentic ways to connect with customers. It’s the key to customer loyalty, the bedrock beneath every sustainable brand.

For many businesses, the answer is found in company-sponsored customer communities. These online communities help companies get the attention of customers- a real challenge in today’s media-rich environment – by providing a location for customers to congregate with others who share their interests. Companies can use customer communities to interact with those who use their products and services, have conversations that matter and form the connections that foster greater brand awareness and loyalty. The result? Inspired customers.

COMMUNITIES OF DEPTH

HiveLive, Inc., has pioneered several new approaches to finding, retaining, supporting and collaborating with customers through online communities. The solutions are tailored to the challenges of chief marketing officers (CMOs), who need to connect with more customers in an era of shrinking budgets and thinner IT resources. Here’s how HiveLive’s technologies can help:

Improved market intelligence. HiveLive’s LiveInsights™ solution engages community members for product reviews and feedback, providing collective intelligence from the minds of customers. With LiveInsights, you can:

• Crowd-source your product design and development priorities so that customers can help you define winning products for your market;
• Stay at the forefront of the innovation curve by infusing the product design process with user insights;
• Pretest ad concepts, logos and other marketing deliverables before they go live to the world; and
• Collect real-time user feedback to drive the test and iteration cycles so that product releases are more refined.

Improved customer loyalty. HiveLive’s LiveLoyalty™ solution provides a place where customers can “share and tell” with other customers through blogs, wikis, chat rooms and other social media applications. This solution builds customer loyalty through ongoing participation and measures purchasing behaviors to guide ongoing product development.

Improved lead generation. HiveLive’s Live- Leads™ solution fuels viral membership growth. Existing members are empowered to invite and validate new members so that the community, its content and a company’s brand can reach an ever-growing audience.

Improved customer support. HiveLive’s LiveAnswers™ solution enables peer-to-peer support through customer forums and membergenerated FAQs. It provides a way for power-users to share their knowledge firsthand with novice users, further strengthening bonds among a community of users and the company that makes the interaction possible. The bottom-line benefits include better customer satisfaction and lower cost of customer care.

COMMUNITIES THAT LAST

All HiveLive marketing solutions are built on the foundation of HiveLive’s patent-pending LiveConnect™ Community Platform. The platform uses infinitely adaptable Web 2.0 building blocks – Hives – that combine people, information and permissions to create flexible information resources. Hives can be used to manage and share any type of information with any number of people. They can be configured as familiar social media applications such as blogs, wikis and forums, or they can take a completely custom form. For example, Hives can be created to share images, brainstorm new ideas, poll users, tally votes, submit questions, build consensus – the possibilities are endless. Those who build the community can choose the people, create the type of information and define the interaction. And since HiveLive communities are built entirely by clicking within the interface, not by coding, they can be built in days, not months.

HiveLive’s unique building block approach allows communities to grow organically and evolve as membership expands and changes. Marketers can choose to tightly control the structure of the community, or they can hand the power to users and let them decide how to build and shape the community. Either way, the on-demand HiveLive platform ensures that a HiveLive community fits each company’s unique “thumbprint” so that the user community feels like a seamless extension of the company itself. And that’s an inspiring thought for any company that’s trying to build a sustainable brand by getting closer to customers.

ABOUT HIVELIVE

HiveLive is the first company to deliver an enterprise social software platform that integrates social networks with information networks for business-focused communities. The company’s on-demand, Web-based platform is powered by a new Web 2.0 building block, called a Hive, which can be configured to support a nearly endless number of community activities such as blogs, forums, chat rooms, polls, FAQs and more. The patent-pending technology uniquely enables companies to build communities of depth and forge tighter bonds with their customers and partners to foster innovation, creativity, loyalty and trust. HiveLive is privately held with headquarters in Boulder, Col. For more information, visit hivelive.com.

© HiveLive, Inc. 2008. Data subject to change without notice

Amplify Your Brand Through The User Experience

A brand is infinitely more than a company logo and color scheme. Brands represent the ethos of organizations. Your brand should elicit a reaction from your customers and serve to connect with them on an emotional level. By building meaningful connections to your brand through compelling user experiences, whether online or off-line, you will effectively strengthen your overall brand perception.

Interactive agencies can assist in this process by helping to architect the user experience when your customers interact with your brand. But what exactly does that encapsulate? An agency should work to magnify their clients’ brand by conveying their key messaging, translating their overall aesthetic and delivering positive interactions with the brand. Web Associates defines User Experience as the overall perception and level of satisfaction that a user associates with a particular Web system, application, process or device.

Reinforce Online User Experiences

Previously, interactive agencies largely focused on the user experience in regard to corporate websites. Leading agencies have since broadened their services to include globalization, localization and accessibility to improve the strength of their clients’ brands. A company’s Web properties need to be easily accessible by search engines as well as accessible by target regions. Content strategies differ greatly from region to region, and having unified campaigns that respect each demographic help to maximize unique and simultaneously positive user experiences.

Today merely having a great website is not enough, as the user experience extends beyond the Internet. From billboards to magazine ads to online properties, everything relating to your brand matters and should be consistent across all mediums. As a result, agencies in the space are expanding their take on user experience to include Web applications, social media, online advertising, banners, mobile/handheld devices, other next-generation technologies as well as product packaging and design. These additional offerings need to be reinforced and in sync with off-line campaigns. Emphasizing consistency across brand outreach channels ensures a more predictable user experience and serves to increase brand loyalty.

Web Associates Employs a Holistic Approach

Agencies that will be successful in the future will create branded and unified user experiences across multiple mediums. Current technologies provide the ability to capture user data through one medium and then repurpose that information to develop more specific and rich user experiences. Using a holistic approach to branding, an agency can translate brands to the online environment and coordinate offline advertising vehicles, resulting in positive, branded user experiences.

Web Associates is an independent interactive agency that amplifies global brands. We produce award-winning creative and innovative online marketing delivered through a single technology layer. Founded in 1995, the California-based agency is headquartered on the Central Coast and operates additional offices in Orange County and the Silicon Valley.

EMC Documentum

EMC® Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is the world’s leading developer and provider of information infrastructure technology and solutions that enable organizations of all sizes to transform the way they compete and create value from their information. A key part of the information infrastructure is EMC Documentum content management and archiving software. Organizations utilize a single platform to work with their content, where they collaboratively create, manage, deliver and archive the content that drives business operations, from documents and discussions to email, Web pages, records and rich media. As a result, EMC Documentum customers, which include thousands of the world’s most successful organizations, harness corporate knowledge, accelerate time to market, increase customer satisfaction, enhance supply chain efficiencies and reduce operating costs, improving their overall competitive advantage.

EMC Documentum Enterprise Marketing Solution

Many companies with the world’s most valuable brands use EMC Documentum software to manage their brands and marketing content, streamlining critical processes while delivering highly personalized communications.

The EMC Documentum Solution for Enterprise Marketing runs various marketing applications on a unified technology platform that combines a digital asset repository with process management, multi-channel publishing, and analytic and reporting capabilities.

The marketing applications address the following functions:

• Brand Management – Manage digital brand assets with a toolset for storing, searching, accessing, modifying, and repurposing rich media assets; these include photographs, design graphics, video, and flash animations. The central repository, intelligent content handling capabilities, and automatic workflows help ensure the right assets are used with the right campaign.
• Interactive Communications – Deliver highly personalized and dynamic content through multi-channel publishing and promote bi-directional communications with Web 2.0 applications. Web content management, dynamic XML delivery, and publishing workflows help ensure the right message is delivered to the right audience.
• Marketing Resource Management (MRM) – Define campaign plans, calendars, and budgets, and integrate with MRM applications such as Aprimo, SAS, and Unica. Reporting and dashboard functions help ensure campaigns are executed on time and within budget.
• Relationship Marketing – Leverage relationship management systems, including tools for working with contact management databases, customer segmentation, and lead tracking. These systems and tools help ensure companies execute segmented campaigns and turn leads into sales.

Why the EMC Documentum Enterprise Marketing Solution?

Google, YouTube, Facebook, Blogger, and other social computing technologies have reshaped our thinking about the brand experience. At the same time, as traditional advertising and mass media channels exhibit declining effectiveness, organizations are examining which marketing efforts really work. Consider that marketing budgets are, generally, flat or decreasing, and we see that marketing professionals are under increasing pressure to show a return on marketing spending. As marketing groups try to demonstrate their relevance to the business, they are essentially required to do more with less.

EMC, makers of market-leading content management and archiving software, brings an end-to-end approach to creating and managing new interactive experiences, automating and tracking the underlying processes, and delivering highly personalized and dynamic communications.

Monitor, Measure and Discover the Trends Influencing your Market

Cymfony, a division of TNS Media Intelligence, tells brands and companies what people are saying about them whether the people are bloggers, traditional journalists or even influential consumers. By sifting and interpreting the millions of voices at the intersection of traditional and social media, Cymfony delivers insights that help companies identify the people, keep on top of the issues and respond to the trends impacting their businesses – at the speed of the market.

Cymfony’s mission is to provide real-time, customized solutions to help marketing employees, product managers and research professionals understand how key constituencies (including journalists, bloggers and influential consumers) talk about their products, brands or companies. In addition, Cymfony provides qualitative and predictive analysis to identify and respond to broad market and media trends.

Cymfony was the first in the industry to support analysis of social media – blogs, message boards, Usenet sites – side by side with traditional media. The 24X7 news cycle is increasingly forcing journalists to mine social media for their next controversial story or quote. Cymfony’s unique convergence solution allows our clients to see the “push and pull” between traditional and social media.

Forrester Research analyzed vendors in the brand monitoring space in 2006. In this evaluation, Cymfony was cited as a “Leader” and received the highest score for its “Current Offering,” a combination of features including scope of services, functionality, data sources and reporting.

Cymfony was founded in 1996 to develop its information extraction technology, InfoXtract, to help U.S. government intelligence agencies find relevant information in high volumes of documents. After several years of continued research and development, Cymfony decided to bring its unique technology to the commercial market with an application to provide more sophisticated measurement of public relations efforts, identifying relevant mentions in traditional media.

In 2007, TNS Media Intelligence – the leading provider of strategic advertising information – acquired Cymfony, establishing TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony as the only media intelligence company capable of providing marketers with greater visibility into the most important influences shaping consumers’ purchase decisions (including advertising, public relations and social media) through advanced analytics and proprietary data.