Community Marketing Blog

East Meets West: Sharing Two Success Stories Between Continents

The following is an excerpt of an interview script with YourStory.in a rapidly growing first geneartion entrepreneur's website in India. To see the full script and listen to an audiocast of the full interview click here.

"I’m Andrew Ballenthin, President of Sol Solutions. We’re a marketing consultancy that specializes in helping businesses create unique brands and effectively define competitive differences. We work with clients to identify the most powerful communicating messages in both online marketing via websites, and offline marketing, via promotional strategies and sales materials.  To put it succinctly, we position companies uniquely, thereby increasing sales."

Recession? What Recession? Not In The Senior Services Sector

Author: Dr. Ellen Brandt, Ph.D. Lifestories Principal
Business: Lifestories Ltd
Topics: Anti-Recession

Demographics is Destiny! While other business sectors seem to struggle like 80-year-olds competing in an Olympic sprint,  the sector which caters to 80-year-olds - senior services - is accelerating steadily and strongly, way ahead of the pack. Consider the following:

Market Research Company Creates An Innovative Value Add Pricing Model

Author: Kevin Schulman, Senior Vice President
Business: TRG iSKY
Topics: Anti-Recession / Growth and Marketing Tips

We are in the market research business, which historically uses a cost-plus pricing model – determine direct costs and charge a multiple of 2x to 3x.  The problems with this are multi-faceted starting with misalignment of incentives between client and supplier.  The client is focused on business metrics and the supplier is focused, knowingly or not, on more research to justify more fees.

Ten Positive Strategies for Today’s Climate

Author: Ian Smith, Founder & CEO
Business: The Portfolio Partnership
Topic: Anti-Recession
PDF: Download Ten Reasons to be Positive

This is a challenging time to be in business but there lies the opportunity. I’ve listed 10 specific characteristics of downtimes and 10 positive strategies that embrace and capitalize on them.

#1 More time to create a focused business: Use this slower paced market to revisit the business you are in – what defines you. This is the perfect time for repositioning, selling off noncore subsidiaries, sharpening up product road maps and value propositions.

Twitter: How To Generate Contacts, Leads And New Clients

We’ve been asked by numerous professionals, “Can you actually get new leads and a payback by using Twitter?” It’s a fair question, especially during tight economic times when any sales and marketing effort has to survive and thrive for the efforts invested. The following tips are based on feedback from professionals who have participated in emails, blog comments and various professional online Group discussions who have gained real leads and new clients as a result of working with twitter.

This article has been jointly compiled and authored by Andrew Ballenthin a branding and marketing expert and Leesa Barnes a leading expert in social media and podcasting. They have teamed up to share tips and techniques for using twitter to generate leads and new clients and help demystify the potential this social network offers.

Business Is Healthy: How A Distributor Tripled Their Sales

Author: Pamela Moore
Business: Isagenix
Topics: Anti-Recession / Success Stories

I am in the Health and Wellness industry and realized that in order for my business to thrive in this economy thinking outside the box was a necessity. I needed to alter my mainstream thought process and recognize a dramatic change in perspective is necessary during these unsettling times. The outcome has resulted in a 300% sales increase and 4 times more productivity.

How To Be Productive With twitter In Just 60 Minutes A Week

If you’re getting used to twitter the good news is it doesn’t have to take more than 12 minutes a day to get valuable results from this excellent networking, news source, and marketing tool: twitter doesn’t have to be a time gobbling monster. A number of LinkedIn professionals expressed in recent group discussions that they felt twitter activity can be counter-productive. Here’s our take on how to turn a potential time consumer into a productive professional tool.

20 Ways twitter Helps Businesses Beat The Economic Downturn

On Monday March 16 we started a discussion with groups on LinkedIn, "Reasons why twitter might be right for your business" and after receiving over 120 comments back we've distilled the strongest themes into 20 simple points on how companies are gaining an advantage by using twitter. It is true some companies are still getting familiar with this new tool and see it as a time consuming and there can be an overload of non-valuable information but over 80% of comments we received indicated the pro's far outweighing the con's.

10 Reasons Why twitter Might Be Right For Your Company

If you heard about twitter or are just getting started and still aren't sure what to do with it consider that twitter offers one of the simplest social networks formats with the least amount of time required to get started and maintain. Like any social media it takes a bit of effort to learn how to use and interact with others, build your own branded twitter page, and generate a Following, but compared to Facebook and MySpace the set-up takes only a fraction of the time and its ongoing use is low maintenance.

Painful Gas Prices: How Two Companies Are Helping Consumers Save Money

Author: Yoram Shalmom, COO AskKinjo
Businesses: GasBuddy, AskKinjo
Topics: Anti-Recession

As the price of fuel goes through a roller coaster of change, consumers want the best price regardless. GasBuddy has been delivering savings to drivers for over 8 years across North America. Mobile technology integration can now deliver savings news to subscriber's cellular phone in the Greater Toronto Area of Canada.