Our working relationships with clients range from one-day planning workshops to creating and managing ongoing marketing programs.  All of our work is tailored to address individual client needs and business goals.  Not sure where to start?  Just call or email any of us and we can talk.

SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY & CONSULTING

Companies often engage with us to get help on how to incorporate social media into their business — in ways that are measurable, deliver business value, and minimize risk.  Common social media consulting engagements include:

• Creating social media monitoring and engagement strategies (see our recent whitepaper), including vendor evaluation, training, business case development, and analytics.Social media monitoring and engagement are becoming “musts” for companies today. To gain market insights. To protect corporate reputation. To extend the customer service function. To understand how corporate programs and products are being viewed in the market. But navigating the complexities involved to realize the benefits and minimize the risks is challenging. We can help – find out more here.
• Sales and customer service social media initiatives: we’re helping clients infuse social media into these key business functions to improve effectiveness and increase revenues. We design pilots, identified optimal technology, train and coach staff, and help scale and operationalize throughout large companies.

• Mapping a company’s social media ecosystem: where are your customers talking, who’s most influential, what issues and approaches resonate, how can the company most effectively engage in existing social media networks.

• Designing and facilitating custom workshops that educate and get buy-in to social media strategies. We believe the most effective way to get people to see the possibilities is to create experiential workshops where people learn, plan, design, and burn down obstacles by doing vs. just listening.

• Evaluating technology platforms/tools: There are many, many new social technology and platforms.  For success, you need to understand what tool or platform best supports what people want to be able to do. We are technology agnostic and constantly evaluate new tools in order to provide clients objective guidance.

• Social media program assessments: Often companies have started a social media initiative, know that it’s not working as well as it could, and ask us for help in assessing what is and isn’t working, and how to most effectively “fix” a program.

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP GROUP BLOGS,  MARKETING PLATFORMS

Gaining attention and earning credibility and trust is no easy feat in today’s environment. However, we’ve helped several companies create an authoritative category position and changed a market conversation by developing and managing  an editorially independent blog of expert contributors (instead of a corporate blog that’s hard to maintain and gain audience for). These thought leadership group blogs:

• Build a social media-based marketing and sales platform
• Generate content for lead generation,  PR, newsletters
• Often become viewed as a news site or online media property with a steady and engaging volume of posts (30-50 per month)
• Require minimal client time investment

More on thought leadership group blogs and marketing platforms:

• FASTforward Blog:  A hosted discussion on Enterprise 2.0 (sponsored by Microsoft)
• The AppGap:  news, views and reviews on the future of work (sponsored by QuickBase, an Intuit company)

ONLINE COMMUNITIES

Online communities, done right, are helping companies to reshape customer service, market research/customer insights, word of mouth marketing, sales, and customer relationship development.  We provide a range of services in this area, from community strategy and measurement design to full scale development, facilitation and community marketing.

A helpful first step in assessing the potential business value of a community for your organization is our one-day workshop,”Developing Successful Online Business Communities”, Beeline Labs will lead your team through every step of a community development process, share best practices, and walk you through how other business communities are working.

• 2008 Tribalization of Business Study, co-produced with Deloitte and the Society of New Communications Research
• Why Wrong Measurements Can Be Bad for Your Community’s Health

SOCIAL “MEDIAFYING”  MARKETING, PR & SALES PROGRAMS

One of the big benefits of social media is being able to achieve the viral network effect, where people find great ideas, content and video and share it with people in their networks.  Yet most companies’ marketing and PR approaches are anti-social, if you will.

We help them “social mediafy” programs and campaigns, which includes:

• Creating programs and content that tap into the nine types of themes that most commonly activate the network effect.
• Developing  new types of content that work in this new sharing environment.
• Changing how you do webinars, white papers, RFPs, press releases and presentations so that these get much more social buzz.
• Showing you how to create new types of networks and relationships with people who are interested in your company, product or category.
• Teaching  you how to add widgets and tools to the content to make it easy for people to share.
• Providing firendly advice  about social sharing etiquette so that you build lasting relationships with people who want to help you socialize your ideas and content.

WORKSHOPS + TRAINING

Clients consistently give high marks to our experiential learning workshops saying they are “inspirational, energizing and filled with real-world, hype-free advice.”

Our  most popular workshops:

• The Tribalization of Business: Realizing the potential of online communities and social networks
• Marketing in a Social Media Age: Realizing the possibilities; burning down the obstacles; learning from emerging best and worst pratcices
• Beyond Buzz: Succeeding in a Conversational World: Creating ideas that get people listening, talking and buying
• Developing Successful Online Business Communities