Our friends at ragan.com have distilled the five important elements that made his writing great:

1. Get to the point.
2. Tell the truth, even if difficult.
3. Paint a picture with words.
4. Use short, simple words.
5. Make verbs do the work.

Read the article HERE at Ragan.com!

We conclude our series today with a video of our team member, Trish Cunningham, meeting with Traxion Control‘s Nikhil Potdar.  Traxion Control is a brand and marketing agency based out of Arlington, Virginia.  

Nikhil brings up fantastic points about synergy, as well as his thoughts on what the future holds for brands and the power of integrated marketing to drive businesses forward! 

(Video Transcript Provided Below)

If your company could benefit from branding, marketing and communication professionals, Brookwoods Group is the source for these people – full time, contract or permanent.  We make sure they have the capabilities, character and chemistry to fit perfectly into your team and help drive your business forward. 

SXSW Interview with Nikhil Potdar from Traxion Control     TRANSCRIPT

Trish Cunningham:  We’re here at South-by-Southwest with Nikhil Potdar, he’s with Traxion Control and we’d like to ask Nikchil how he’s branching his company and working with businesses and clients to bring together the marketing and communications aspects of their business to help drive their clients and their own business forward.  Can you tell me how you got into marketing and brand marketing?

Nikhil Potdar:  Yes, that’s absolutely a great question.  A word that a lot of people try to shy away from is the word synergy.  They think it’s very commercial, very corporate, but synergy is the best way to connect the community and the humanistic aspects of all these brands and all these companies.  Companies should be humanized really easily just by remembering that all companies can be measured just like humans, like selling cars, so we take that approach because we’re from the music industry.  Everything is artist-centric and our M-O is to get your message across and coming from an artist-centric community helps us to understand that relationships and loyalties and really articulate the fact that marketing is not just about selling something, it’s about reaching people.  And to further answer your questions, synergy is a great way of taking a brand or an artist or a venue or a store and saying you guys should know each other –you guys would do great work together…if you aren’t aware of each other then let’s curate this process.

Trish Cunningham:  So basically it’s humanize the exchange before you monetize the transaction.  So tell us a little bit about how you’ll be using electronic media in addition to the traditional media with some of your clients to business their business forward

Nikhil Potdar:  That’s a great question and the most fun part is obviously the creative.  Our organization specializes in original creative production as well and the most fun of it is driving the arts, driving ideas driving creative components to it and where would creativity be in business without a way to monetize that.  Advertising – it’s another scary word that people in the arts community shy away from, but truly that it’s just arts, you can get your message across artistically, and thoughtfully and appropriately across through digital mediums such as mobile apps and they call it nontraditional, but advertising on blogs and websites will become traditional and it’s going to become how we perceive information and how we understand the world.

Trish Cunningham:  I absolutely agree – Nikhil thank you so much for talking with us today… Traxion Control – keep an eye out for them!

Our team met Daud Power of SavvyCard while exploring the SXSW Tradeshow last month in Austin.  The SavvyCard app provides several customizable options so that when prospective clients are looking for more information about you or your services (and expertise), it’s just a click away! 

Sales and business development teams will automatically understand the cool factor this app provides.  SavvyCard’s focus on a quality user experience makes this tool an attractive resource for industry professionals.  Even job seekers can take advantage of this digital tool as well, making them more marketable to a potential employer.  

(Video Transcript Provided Below)

If your company could benefit from marketing and communication professionals, Brookwoods Group is the source for these people – full time, contract or permanent.  We make sure they have the capabilities, character and chemistry to fit perfectly into your team and help drive your business forward. 

SXSW Interview with Daud Power from SavvyCard   TRANSCRIPT

Daud Power:  Hi I’m Daud Power of Savvy Phone and we’re here at South by Southwest announcing the public launch of our SavvyCard product, which is an outbound marketing and personal branding tool and what we’ve found with our early users, who have predominantly been small business users, that they have found it very effective as a tool whereby they can reach out to existing clients and also new clients in a much richer way than a conventional just outbound sales call.  For example, what happens with Savvy Card is that at the end of the process of creating your own SavvyCard, you get a number of graphical assets, one of the being a graphical email signature  which can embed at the bottom of your emails so now when you send the email out to a prospective client or an existing client partner or supplier, that it actually puts a face to the name – where we’ve found that with a lot of people, particularly where there’s a lot of outbound sales activity where the end potential customer has never seen the person, it has a real resonance where they feel like they already know the person before they’ve  even met them. 

And this leads us one of the other things that’s happening is the graphical assets is the QR code, that’s also generated and you can have on your printed materials which will then direct any users whether it’s a data sheet or a point of sale material so that when they scan it takes them straight to your Savvy Card, whether it’s a SavvyCard that’s branded again for business or to the individual, for example, the sales person for a particular area.

And also from a prospective of educating the potential client as to your own skills in a particular area, the Savvy button you can configure that to link to articles there in the national press or trade press that show your client you know your space, so it’s an educational tool as well.

In terms of why we’re the richer experience versus a standard business card is that because our technology is a web app it means that the recipient namely the person that gets sent to link to your card, whether from email signature or printed material, they can – they don’t need to download an application, they just click on the link and it takes them to your SavvyCard.  Also, as long as they have a browser, it doesn’t matter if they are on a desktop a tablet or a smart phone we actually dynamically adapt so that if we recognize the user is on a smart phone, that when the user then hits the call button, it will regularly call the phone, whereas on the desktop it will just display the phone number, or if they have Skype integrated, it will initiate the call or ask the user if they want to initiate the call via Skype.

Similarly, the find me button which the person can configure to have their actual physical location, it will use the mobile device’s GPS to give them, show them on the map, where the location that is and they can also use Google Maps to find turn-by-turn directions.

Throughout the course of the week, our team was able to connect with and learn from interactive colleagues from a broad spectrum of  industries, including Oil & Gas, Healthcare, Education, HiTech, Non-Profit, and Aerospace.  Although the industries function quite differently from each other, the majority of us can leverage the same or similar initiatives to connect with our own users.

Which is why when we met Kevin Wanek and the rest of their team at iTriage, we knew our users had to learn about them!  

Kevin’s description of iTriage’s strategy and drive to empower their users transcends industries.  Businesses are beginning to learn the value of the user experience so we hope this will be an increasing trend we see throughout organizations.  Developing your marketing strategy to include a focus on improving the user experience may seem less important than other key objectives, but iTriage reveals that you can successfully build a business focused on empowering your customers!

(Video Transcript Provided Below)

If your company could benefit from marketing and communication professionals, Brookwoods Group is the source for these people – full time, contract or permanent.  We make sure they have the capabilities, character and chemistry to fit perfectly into your team and help drive your business forward. 

SXSW Interview with Kevin Wanek from iTriage   TRANSCRIPT

Kevin Wanek:  My name is Kevin and I am with iTriage, a mobile healthcare application for consumers.  Our goal right now is to really get help to the people who need it when they need it… So that’s kind of what we’re focusing on.  What we’re seeing in the future and what we’re gonna be focusing on is personalization and how technology can help people make their decisions easier and better and more efficient, especially in the healthcare industry. 

How we’re going to do that: we’re going to be integrating with partners such as insurance companies, healthcare providers — across the board –  so that we can provide the data to consumers in an easy to read way… and (when it’s available) with mobile technology.   So that’s kind of the direction that we’re heading right now.  The businesses love it.  All of our clients will be working with a lot of healthcare providers right now – all the hospitals.  They think it’s great that we’re moving in that direction to really empower our users to make better healthcare decisions.  So, even at here at South by Southwest, people are loving it….

Whether it’s people at insurance companies or with other technology companies…  That we’re offering these solutions to both providers (to access and engage their consumers) but also that consumers can empower themselves in their healthcare.  So that’s what we are really looking forward to at iTriage.

Continuing with our SXSW Industry Insight Series this week, we asked Alex Ackermans from XOMO how today’s marketing and communication professionals can utilize the technology that XOMO provides.  The tool is obviously great for events and conferences, but the user experience XOMO creates is one of the applications most valuable attributes. 

If you manage events and tradeshows then you will enjoy this tool, no doubt!  Those professionals outside of events-related management can use XOMO’s user experience attributes toward potential programs more appropriate for your target customer, as well. 

That is another advantage of attending SXSW Interactive, your mind is open to so many possibilities that leave you inspired to create when you are back at the office!

(Video Transcript Provided Below)

If your company could benefit from marketing and communication professionals, Brookwoods Group is the source for these people – full time, contract or permanent.  We make sure they have the capabilities, character and chemistry to fit perfectly into your team and help drive your business forward. 

SXSW Interview with Alex Ackermans from XOMO TRANSCRIPT

Alex Ackermans:  Hi!  I’m Alex from Xomo and we’re the makers of the South By Southwest GoApps.  It’s available on the four platforms: Phone7, IOS, Android and Blackberry.  And I’m going to talk to you a little about Xomo’s plan and what we plan to bring to the apps.  SouthBy GoApp is a mobile event guide that works offline and seamlessly synchs with your schedule so that you can check out all the events at South By Southwest in the Interactive, Music and Film tracks.  And you can also check out floor plans for the venues and visit the trade shows and get information about all the speakers and the exhibits. 

So we are using the same technology to build a variety of mobile event guides and we are using this same technology to bring out a new module called SpotLight which allows to have a free mobile event guide on their iPhone device that you can create yourself on the website.  So SpotLight is going to be used for smaller scale events up to a few hundred sessions and speakers.  You can visit spotlight at www.androidspotlight.com and fill in your festival schedule with events, sessions, panels, venues and specify whatever information you want about your event… and publish that to your users.  You can then download the SpotLight app on the iStore and get the event information and the schedule just like they do with the SouthBy app. 

And then there’s a  lot of features we’re planning to bring over the course of the next few months – things like sharing your favorites with your friends, allowing you to see who’s attending where, check-ins, and all those other cool features that will allow you to get the most out of south By Southwest next year.

Before heading back to our offices in Houston, we asked some exhibitors at the SXSW Tradeshow what our users should know is on the horizon for marketing, communication, and interactive initiatives for 2012 and beyond!  

Our first nugget of Industry Insight comes from Sandra Freeman with Marketo.   Sandra discusses the importance of marketing automation and how we can expect this aspect of the industry to grow throughout 2012. 

(Transcript Provided Below)

If your company could benefit from marketing automation professionals, Brookwoods Group is the source for these people – full time, contract or permanent.  We make sure they have the capabilities, character and chemistry to fit perfectly into your team and help drive your business forward. 

SXSW Interview with Sandra Freeman from Marketo TRANSCRIPT

Sandra Freeman:  I’m Sandra Freeman and I think one of the key things for 2012 is to understand the growing area of marketing automation and how marketers can use that whole technology and automation to improve the lead life cycle.  What I mean by that is really understanding how to drive more leads into the funnel, generating more leads, and then engaging with those leads.  So as an example, we can use marketing automation to e-mail people, to watch what they’re engaging on on your site, what their behaviors are, also tracking social … and then being able to do more with that. 

So, letting your sales reps know who’s engaged, so they can call on the hottest leads so that they can close more deals faster.  Keeping up with that is really important and there’s a lot of opportunity out there as more and more businesses are using this technology to drive more leads and ultimately, of course, more revenue.  So as marketers we need to do that to support our sales teams and make them more productive because the sales teams are very expensive resources and you want to cut [wasted time] down so they can spend less time on cold calls and more time talking to the right leads and generating more revenue. 

I know that this has been a hard thing is to measure how marketing is doing, but that’s one of the things at Marketo that we’re trying to really strongly focus on is every program has to have a return on investment… and having the tools to be able to do that and saying “this person CAME FROM this booth” (like South By Southwest here today) and how after that they engaged with us and how it moved through the “final.”  Being able to then quantify that and being able to say, “this program resulted in X dollars and that’s why we should invest more in THIS program… or less in this program and more in something else.  So, we strongly believe in that.  We look at all kinds of marketing channels and we analyze that on an ongoing basis and every marketer SHOULD.  But sometimes it’s hard, so you need tools to do that like marketing automation.

Don’t get us wrong, you can definitely attract new subscribers on your website with giveaways and exclusive information.  But in order to maximize the user experience for your quality subscribers, we recommend adding a welcome campaign to your new subscriber check list!

Taking this into account, we were really excited to come across Todd Wasserman‘s examples of “6 Successful Twitter Hashtag Campaigns“.  The examples Wasserman gives readers includes hashtag campaigns that have been successful around the globe and even one that the Obama administration performed in late December 2011. 

Majority of the examples are B2C oriented, but they could easily be customized for B2B customers too… For instance, using Radio Shack hashtag campaign (#6 on Wasserman’s list) would be a great way to have your users vote on certain feature add-ons or event giveaways.

Which hashtag campaign do you think has made the most impact on the twitterverse?

The problem is majority of the interview tips you hear are tips you (and your competition) have already heard throughout your career.   So, how are you to set yourself apart when your competition has the same tricks up their sleeves?  Arik Hanson helps candidates think outside the box with “PR newbies: 8 uncommon tips for job interviews” by offering some tips you haven’t heard that can help you land your next role.  Not just for PR newbie’s, Hanson’s tips will help any job seeker looking for new ways to set themselves apart from other industry professionals.

Which one of Hanson’s interviewing tips do you consider the most valuable?

And which businesses are offering customers the option to pay by tapping?  Erin Dostal‘s read about Pinkberry to accept Google Wallet at 69 retail locations reveals that more and more businesses are seeing the advantage in this new technology. 

We are not sure how this will influence the future of B2B transactions just yet, but we imagine organizations will leverage this new technology somehow…