We are very pleased to have presented for the second webinar in the Startup Grind series for 1776.vc — an organization where top entrepreneurs go to scale their companies.
View the full presentation video here
MDV Donates $1000 to the Maryland Food Bank
This morning we donated $1000 to the Maryland Food Bank to help our friends and neighbors during the Corona quarantine. Please join us and donate today. Any amount helps. https://mdfoodbank.org/
MDV Named 16th Fastest Growing Company in Md
On October 17, at a BBJ event in the Warby Parker building, MDV Interactive was named the 16th fastest growing company in the greater Baltimore region. The award was accepted by founder, Marci De Vries and partner Lisa Wurfl-Roeca.
Finalist for Bridging the Gap Award from GBC
MDV Interactive, a woman-owned business in greater Baltimore has been nominated for the 2016 Bridging the gap award from the Greater Baltimore Committee.
For more than a decade, the GBC has been recognizing, through its Bridging the Gap Awards, exceptional minority- and women-owned businesses and majority businesses and executives who nurture the development of minority businesses in greater Baltimore and Maryland.
The GBC’s Bridging the Gap initiative works to advance greater Baltimore’s business culture by creating an atmosphere for majority and minority- and women-owned businesses to form mutually-beneficial partnerships. The Bridging the Gap initiative strives to equip businesses with the tools and support to develop such collaborations.
Bridging the Gap works to:
- Nurture the creation of legacy wealth among minority- and women-owned businesses.
- Communicate the business case for minority inclusion and development to the region’s larger business community.
- Provide training opportunities and a match program that enhances capabilities within the minority- and women-owned business community to enable successful participation in partnership opportunities.
When: Thursday, November 10, 2016; 5:30 p.m. registration, 6 p.m. program
Where: The Grand Baltimore, 225 N. Charles St., Baltimore, MD 21201
Cost: Member individual: $75; Member table of 10: $600; Non-member individual: $100; Non-member table of 10: $800
Customer Touchpoints
An integral planning component of all social media campaigns is to plot out the customer touch points with your brand, purchase vehicles, salespeople, delivery vehicles and post-implementation. If your company takes the time to carefully think about each time the company touches a customer prior to, during, and after the purchase, you will find that all aspects of the company’s operations are touch points, and they all need consideration from a customer interaction perspective.
When you have all of the touch points identified, the real interesting challenge is to QUANTIFY the interactions. In this exercise, go ahead and rate the interactions on a scale of 1-10, measuring how enjoyable they are/were for the customer, and whether or not each touch point helps the customer move toward a successful and happy sales experience. You can also measure touch point interactions against your company’s strategic goals.
Most of us find these big swoops and gaps in satisfaction, where customers are overjoyed with some aspects of the sale, and others leave them cold.
If there are very unsuccessful touch points, you can bet money that you’ll start hearing about it in Social Media. Here come those comments… for better or worse.
Social Media Strategy begins with your Reputation
Working in social media has morphed again. Just last year it was still about content, content, content to put out and then re-post across social media venues.
Recently, we have found it is MORE important (the foundation to the campaign) to begin with Reputation Management. This means you our your agency goes out and reads your reviews EVERY DAY in EVERY VENUE and responds to EVERY REVIEW from people who have already experienced your product or service. As far as the Internet goes, an experiencer holds more weight than any marketing collateral will ever have. If someone says they have tried your product/service and it was less than satisfactory, you have a real problem — because in the eyes of the Web, this negative review is as close to truth as it gets.
Furthermore, your competition will try to enter your space with false reviews that you will need to handle delicately. And this is harder than it sounds, because the false reviews are so OBVIOUSLY FALSE (to you) that it is tempting to overreact, which then does double damage to your brand.
So start with Reputation Management as the foundation for your social media strategy, and then build layers on top of a solid reputation. More about the other layers to come.
Forrester Social Technology Profile Tool
Anyone working in social media needs to know the social technographics of their target audience. Below is an easy chart from Forrester Research that shows who does what in social media. So for example, if your marketing target is a Creator, make sure your campaigns provide elements that can be used by your target marketing to create their own content. If your target is a Spectator, make sure there is a lot of content to read and understand so they can become an expert.
Google Trends for Social Media Marketing
This morning I had a call with my Google Adwords rep and she pointed me to a very interesting tool for research. It can be used for social media OR Adwords, or really many other things.
Go to http://google.com/trends
On this page you can enter keywords that you feel relate to your business. And then you can slice and dice interest by country, state, region and then also select a date range. I’ve added some screen grabs below based on a Maryland search for the key phrase “boots.”
AMA in the AM Big Data Event
Join an all-star cast from the world of Big Data!
May 28, 2015, 8:00AM-10:30AM
Brown Center
1300 W Mt Royal Ave
Atrium & Falvey Hall
Baltimore, MD 21217
Meet the innovative players and top leaders from the world of Big Data as they have a frank in-depth exchange on critical business topics and openly and honestly discuss real capabilities of Big Data, separating the fiction from the reality.
Led by a moderator, this panel will address industry challenges and provide a comprehensive overview of current business concerns, offering solutions and strategies for success.
– See more at: http://amabaltimore.org/4203/ama-in-the-am-big-data-event/
Don’t Fear the Epiphanot
Published in the Colorado Springs Business Journal September 9, 2011
Have you ever put up a Facebook status update only to instantly regret it? I’ve done it more than I care to admit, but was pleased to find that the Urban Dictionary has already addressed the sentiment. These statements are called “epiphanots.”
According to the Urban Dictionary, an epiphanot is defined as:
An idea that at first seems like an amazing insight (at least to the conceiver) but later turns out to be pointless, mundane, stupid, or incorrect, and often is the root cause of bad decisions.
www.urbandictionary.com
We should add an entry to the dictionary called “epipinot-o-phobia” – defined as the C-Suite’s fear of putting something online that they regret later. It’s this fear that keeps many companies off of social media, or causes companies to outsource their social media effort.