Marketing Technology Blog

Seems like I have friends with all of the companies nominated for a Techpoint Mira Gazelle award this year! My company is eligible for the award, but it’s going to be difficult not to cheer for any of my friends – they all stand a great chance of winning! These are fantastic companies that are growing quickly and successfully here in Indianapolis.

• Bluelock – I’ve written quite a bit on my blog about Bluelock. They’ve got a great team and we’ve become good friends over the last couple of years. Now that cloud computing is mainstream, I’m looking forward to seeing their company capitalize on the incredible technology they’ve brought to Indiana. If you’re a company with minimal resources, BlueLock’s environment is fantastic to host in.
• Cantaloupe.tv – Cantaloupe is another company that I’ve worked with in the past few years. Their video subscription program is fantastic, allowing companies to build out a video magazine professionally and easily. Cantaloupe also just launched Backlight, a fantastic solution for corporations who wish to host their own videos in high quality (with interactive links).
• Of course I’ve got to cheer for Compendium to win since I’m their VP of Blogging Evangelism (and I beat them last year with Patronpath). Compendium sales are skyrocketing and we’re building a great cult following with enterprise clients. They love the simplicity of the system combined with the organic search results they’re receiving.
• Formspring – Formspring has been a true blessing to me and my clients. Whenever we need to put up a registration page, a contact form, or even a purchase page, Formspring has a simple drag and drop interface that can’t be beat. It’s great to see Ade, Chris and the team up for the Mira award as well. Ade grew his company organically and it’s a fantastic product and friendly team. The new site and logo look fantastic – just in time for the awards!
• Right On Interactive – Troy and Amol and the team at Right On Interactive saw a gap in the industry and jumped on it! We’re using Right On Interactive to automate educational campaigns for our clients in the startup phase. We simply update data in Salesforce and 5 Buckets campaigns take off and email and voice message our clients via ExactTarget.
• Vontoo – Bob, Dustin and the team at Vontoo have done an incredible job with Vontoo. If you’re looking for an outbound voice integration system that’s easily integrated into your application, Vontoo is the best. I use this system 2 or 3 times a month to send out webinar reminders to our clients. It’s a fantastic system! Vontoo is another company that’s worked very long and hard to get the business off the ground and they deserve a lot of recognition.
• The Basement Design and Motion – if you see some great flash integration and campaigns around Indianapolis. I’ve not worked with them directly, but I know many customers of theirs – and they’re all happy! A former colleague of mine, Jeff, recently joined them so I’m looking forward to learning more about their services. Simply interact with their website and you’ll see why they’re special.
• Sensory Ventures – The only company in the awards that I have no experience with is Sensory Ventures, LLC. I’m looking forward to finding out more information on them!

Good luck friends! I’m sure we’ll all be celebrating each others success when the winner is announced on May 16th. I’m really proud to know so many of these successful entrepreneurs in the region and very proud to have helped many of them at one point or another.

I’ve reduced the size of the video a little to fit in my blog, so some of the graphics look a little distorted. You can see this full video at Techpoint’s Video Magazine.

This is a video done for Techpoint by Cantaloupe to showcase the 2008 Mira Award winners. This was an incredible achievement by Patronpath and provides some great insight into what we do and why we won the award. Great video and you even see me in it for a split second.

I wish Cantaloupe had an embed functionality so I wouldn’t have to hack the video code to put it on my site, though!

Three companies that I’m closely aligned with have been nominated as finalists for Indiana’s Mira Awards:

• ExactTarget – no doubt with it’s growth and fantastic leadership that this company will be a a worthy recipient of the award. There are pieces of ExactTarget’s system that simply defy the laws of physics on how quickly they can produce and send emails. I loved the 2 and a half years I worked for ExactTarget!

  On Monday, I had the pleasure of stopping by and chatting with Scott Dorsey, President of ExactTarget, and it was as if I had never left. He was energized, optimistic, and always smiling. That he took the time out to see me is such a testament to how good a friend and mentor he’s become.

  With my new position at Patronpath, I still get to work with ExactTarget quite a bit. Once we’re fully up with one of our clients, we’ll have ExactTarget’s largest Enterprise account up and running. For that account, ExactTarget developed a custom report for us so we could send emails on behalf of territory representatives and provide the representatives with a report of what their client’s interests were based on their click-throughs.

  It’s great having old team mates at ExactTarget as well, since they’re receptive to my feedback. Having been a product manager there and then moving back to the role of customer is a pretty valuable commodity. (I wish I was able to purchase my options before I lost them!)

  We also have an Agency account with ExactTarget and have a powerful, automated integration for restaurants. On a nightly basis, with no interaction from the restaurant we send out any one of ten or so campaigns – birthday, anniversary, no interaction for X days, purchases in excess of X dollars, etc. It’s a fantastic retention mechanism for restaurants.

  And, working with the 2012 Super Bowl Committee, I’m developing a Wordpress plugin for automated subscriptions from a Wordpress blog through ExactTarget. It’s about 80% complete right now – I’m just working on trying to automate the cron work.

• Compendium Blogware – When Chris Baggott was still at ExactTarget, we started to see an opportunity for blogging applications to really harness content and provide a much better targeting for Search Engine Optimization.

  With my son starting at IUPUI, I couldn’t risk jumping on board Compendium when Chris asked. It may have been one of my biggest blunders. With much angst and even a little jealousy, I had to sit and watch Chris and Ali Sales take Compendium to market! Note: Ali Sales was also instrumental in ExactTarget and ChaCha’s startup histories… ChaCha is also nominated!

  I’m really proud to have been in those very first Saturday Starbucks meetings where we developed the business case, though!

  Here’s an early interview of Chris speaking about Compendium:
  

  Compendium is doing a second round of funding now and is growing very rapidly. The combination of Search Engines and the efficiency of developing a process for corporations to implement blogging is hot right now and Compendium is at the forefront. I stopped by with Chris a few weeks ago and threw him a couple more ideas for his product.

  Chris has been a great mentor to me and Ali has been an inspirational President… they have implemented my own Agency version that I’ll be launching soon. If you’re interested in Compendium, please connect with me directly and I can let you know, “Why not just use [Blogger, WordPress, Typepad, etc.]. Or you can sign up for Compendium’s Newsletter (but be sure to put me in the reference!) and win a free iPod Touch.

• Patronpath – Marketing and Ecommerce for the Restaurant Industry – last but not least is my current employer. Patronpath is experiencing triple-digit growth right now. As restaurants need to squeeze their wallets due to increased prices and reduced dine-out numbers, the only way to grow their business is to get a robust take-out or delivery business.

  Online Ordering has grown some of our customers directly out of the red and into the black. Though our core, we pay a lot of attention to ensuring our clients utilize good search engine optimization and great site development. It’s not enough to have online ordering, you have to find the online ordering – a point that most of our competition has missed.

  In the last 8 months we’ve integrated 4 different POS systems, a robust callcenter integration, redesigned our interface to reduce abandonment rates and implemented a turnkey national email newsletter for one of our partners (mentioned above in our ExactTarget Enterprise implementation). In one show of our muscle, a major chain requested a feature of our system that we implemented over a single weekend. That same feature had taken the competition months to develop. We’ve got a lot more in development right now and we’re moving into 2008 with barrels blazing!

  Patronpath is aggressively growing and I’m aggressively pushing automation and (will soon be) leveraging a state of the art virtualized environment in Bluelock to keep up. We’ve got an ace development partner who has implemented some of the largest ecommerce companies on the globe (internationally) and I’m confident that by 2009, we’ll be a major force in the industry. The fact is that we know how marketing works, how ecommerce works, and how restaurants work – and the competition doesn’t.

  We’ve also recently added Marty Bird to the mix. I think Marty pulled 60% of my workload off of me the day he walked in the door and it’s been an incredible pleasure to work with him. His continuous drive for improvement and strategy is exactly what we need at this point in Patronpath!

  Note: Ignore the Patronpath site – we’ve got a new one coming this month!

I have to add that I’m not the only connection between these three companies. You’ll notice that each company has exceptional branding – thanks to Kristian Andersen and team. Kristian is an amazing guy and runs a fantastic company that is able to execute like no other agency or consultancy I’ve ever worked with. Kristian helps small companies get big, and he’s assembled an incredible team here locally to do it. He’s a good friend as well.

Last week when I attended the technology summit here in Indianapolis, Techpoint, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels opened up the event with a great speech on the positive outlook here in Indiana.

As the Governor was getting interviewed, I stood to the side with Pat Coyle and chatted. This sounds really goofy, but I think there’s an awesome opportunity for social networking and blogging technologies to bring more transparency to our local and regional governments.

I’m sure this might scare the you-know-what out of many people holding esteemed positions, but having a medium that connects tax-payers with tax-spenders would be a phenomenal step forward for government. Rather than confront Mitch with a statement like that, I invited him to send some of his staff to the regional Strategic Online Marketing conference here in Indianapolis – Get Your MBO.

I believe, after hearing the stats and thought leaders speaking about leveraging Online technologies, Mitch and his team may take a closer look at what this could provide them and save the local tax base.

I left Mitch Daniels with my business card and a card advertising GetYourMBO – and today I received this in the mail:

That Governor Daniels (I have a hard time calling him Mitch) and his staff took the time to mail me a nice note like this was a nice surprise. I hope it’s not the last time I see the Governor… and I really hope his team sees this and joins us.

Note to the Daniels Team:

If you are planning on attending on December 7th, please contact me directly through my contact form. I promise I’ll save the taxpayers some additional money when you sign up for GetYourMBO!