The Cloud Communications Alliance is a one-of-a-kind, for-profit alliance created by eight of the most notable service providers in the enterprise VoIP market. Eager to capitalize on their common technology platforms and leadership in a crowded marketplace, the CEOs of these eight companies viewed their alliance as a way to set themselves even further apart from their VoIP competitors and more effectively operate against the entrenched bureaucratic, ILECs and cable companies.

The members of the alliance wanted to brand their initiative with a simple, powerful, memorable identity that would allow them to launch in a very public manner and attract the attention of competitors, customers and investors alike. After interviewing a number of competing firms they selected Idea-ware to develop all marketing for the alliance and Summit Group Communications out of Salt Lake to handle all Public Relations.

Both Idea-ware and Summit immediately recognized the potentially revolutionary nature of the alliance: By aligning their networks and their operations these eight companies would effectively provide the first integrated, coast-to-coast alternative to the 100 year old Public Switched Telephone Network or PSTN - something that has not existed since the breakup of “Ma Bell” almost 25 years ago. But even more importantly, we recognized an alliance of providers could push the evolution and adoption of this new breed of communications - “cloud communications” – even further and faster than they could by themselves.

Idea-ware interviewed all eight CEOs and developed a range of options for an integrated corporate identity. Ultimately, the group settled on the simplest and most straightforward name – “Cloud Communications Alliance” – because it afforded them the opportunity to define the concept of “cloud communications”, fully embrace it and fundamentally own it. Agreement among the CEOs was unanimous.

Once the name was selected, Idea-ware went to work on copywriting and branding, developing a new logo and website while Summit turned its attention to developing the public launch activities and briefing reporters in advance of a launch at the Cloud Computing show in New York on April 19.

Working around the clock, both teams finished their preparations as the CEOs of all eight alliance partners began arriving in New York. The successful brand launch garnered the attention numerous press and industry analysts as well as prominent investors.

As Clark Peterson, CEO of Telesphere and the first Chairman of the alliance states, “Idea-ware’s branding work successfully established the alliance and its members as the unequivocal leaders of the rapidly emerging new paradigm called “cloud communications”. And their ability to exceed the branding expectations of eight very experienced and opinionated CEOs – in such a short period of time - was truly remarkable.”

Logicworks thought they had the description of their business down to a pretty simple statement: “We’re a complex managed hosting company focused exclusively on multi-server environments that require high-availability infrastructures and replicated/redundant databases.”

That statement was more concise than most managed hosting companies.  The problem was, Logicworks’ largest competitor - Rackspace, with its tagline “Fanatical Support” - had virtually cornered the market for brand awareness. Logicworks was planning to recruit a very senior industry veteran CEO to lead its next phase of growth and begin to aggressively invest in marketing. The challenge was to find a concise, powerful message that captured all of Logicworks unique value in five words or less.

Idea-ware came to SoHo to help this Manhattan-based innovator find that message. We met with the staff, including sales and engineering teams to get a sense of the personality of the company. We interviewed key customers to determine what drew them to Logicworks, and away from larger competitors. And we probed those competitors looking for areas of weakness to exploit.

Then we sat down to get creative…

We came up with a half dozen or so themes or directions we could take the message – each complete with several paragraphs of high-level messaging and potential taglines - and presented them all to the executive team. As a group, we ultimately ended up settling on the theme called “Hard Stuff” and the phrase “We Host The Hard Stuff”.

In just five words we managed to separate and position Logicworks apart from its competition who focus on a broader range of solutions and often “water down” their technology and expertise. The phrase also neatly captured the tech-enthusiast, NYC-centric personality of the company, and wrapped it all up in an edgy, memorable and easily brandable phrase.

Logicworks incoming CEO, Rick Ellenberger, quickly embraced Idea-ware’s work.  As the former CEO of Broadwing, a $2.5B Fortune 500 broadband infrastructure provider and president of MCI’s $10B Business Markets division, Rick possessed a proven track record of building powerful marketing and sales-driven brands. Together we’re continuing to refine the message and make it a guiding principal of Rick’s new course for the company.

As Rick says, “Idea-ware got right to heart of what makes Logicworks unique. And their impact on this company at this time will be legendary.”

briefings, etc.  More often than not, the effort falls short as their white paper or analyst quote is lost in the seas of information overload.

We believe the answer to thought leadership lies not in a periodic sighting in those seas - it is to BE the sea.  Or better yet - a filtered version of it.  Take any hot topic area and there are thousands of news sources about it. Your audience can’t keep up with all the information.  Give them a way to do so and you have just become their “thought leader”.

In the past the only way to do that was to build an online portal that aggregated information from multiple sources and presented it in a clean concise fashion.  But for most companies that was an endeavor beyond their reach requiring lots of RSS feeds, significant editing time, and the cost of building and maintaining a fully administrable website.  Until today…

HiveFire is a Cambridge MA start-up that is changing the game of Thought-Leadership marketing or what they call “Content Curation Marketing”  Their hosted, SaaS model service allows anyone to create and administer a robust thought leadership portal in just a few minutes a day.  It uses RSS feed sources and SEO-like keyword filtering to narrow down a newsfeed to several dozen of the most relevant articles per day.  You log in and flags the articles you want to keep, discard or feature on your portal.  The system then automatically drops them into sections you pre-determine - e.g new product announcements, press releases, opinion pieces - and auto creates an email newsletter that goes to your distribution list once a day.  You can add and highlight your own blog entries or news items and put them at the top.  The net result is a news hub related to your topic that contains only the most relevant news and information on your particular area topic and allows you to feature or highlight your own news - making you the perceived leader in that space.  And it takes just a few minutes a day!

For an example of how this looks check out greendatacenternews.org This portal was set up by Lisa Rhodes, VP of Sales and Marketing at Verne Global - a green Data Center located in Iceland. Verne wanted to become the defacto thought leader in the Green Data Center space and used HiveFire to do it.  The site has not only raised Verne’s profile tremendously, it’s become a heavily trafficked source for industry folks and Lisa now has vendors and competitors emailing her their press releases and product launches to profile on the site.  Now THAT’s being a thought leader.

Idea-ware has become big fans of HiveFire and we’re are working with several customers to implement the system.  If  you are interested in developing your own thought leadership marketing effort - give us a call.

~JPL

Steve Francesco left Wall Street years ago to build a different kind of telecommunications company.

He knew from experience that financial service firms needed voice and data communications with maximum uptime - because even a few seconds of outage can mean millions of dollars of lost revenue. Unfortunately, most telecom service providers focus only what happens outside the clients premises and as Steve and his engineers knew - more of then than not - the problems that would bring down a service would be found inside the office: open ports, poor LAN cabling, unsecured WiFi hubs, etc.

So they set out to build Cohere Communications - a next generation managed services provider that delivers both Managed IP Communications Services AND Managed IT Infrastructure services.

Over the years Cohere’s unique model and personal support garnered them a loyal customer base of financial services and media firms and yet, their brand never really stood out. Steve felt that their value and message was still lost among the chatter of a crowded marketplace. So he called Idea-ware.

We went to work evaluating Cohere’s operational approach, looking for unique advantages. We interviewed their customers to learn how Cohere managed to provide a higher quality of service - both in terms of technical performance and human support – than some of some of the best and biggest competitors.

We came back with several brand frameworks to choose from, ultimately setting on the idea that Cohere is the invisible force (the “coherence”) that binds together all the elements of an enterprise communication system (LAN, WAN, etc) to allow them to work effectively together. Around this message we created a new logo, and a whole new design for the website.

Cohere now finally has a brand, a story and a message that matches the power of its service. As Steve likes to say, “For years I worked with various marketing managers and freelancers but no one was ever able to quite get to the heart of what makes Cohere unique. Idea-Wade was able to find that essence, communicate it, and build us a brand standard that we can apply ourselves now to any medium from email to web to print. We simply couldn’t be more pleased.”

They had recently launched their company and website, and had just started selling their new “grape seed-based” products in retailers like Whole Foods and Amazon.  As a start up, they would need to spend their marketing dollars wisely, yet they were eager to begin building awareness of their brand during the important holiday buying season.

Planting the Seeds of Success
Idea-ware suggested a program of social media promotion and outreach to women on Facebook, Twitter and blogs aimed at introducing the new brand and building grassroots awareness of their innovative products.

Janine worked with them to identify prominent bloggers, arrange for samples to be shipped for review, and then scheduled a Twitter “launch party” to give bloggers and interested parties a chance to interact with the founders in real time on Twitter and learn about the power of “seed-based” skin care products.

Awareness Blossoms…
The program yielded results almost immediately.  118 Twitter users RSVP’d to attend the Twitter Launch party and the event ultimately drew over 150 participants.  A random sampling of attendees Twitter accounts showed an average of 2368 followers per participant for a potential total audience of 355,000 Twitter users!   More importantly, the attendees themselves generated more than 3,880 mentions of the hashtag during the event, as shown below. In total the party put Seed+ at almost a quarter of a percent of all posts on Twitter that day overcoming several popular trending topics and putting it into the top 250 topics.

In addition, to the Twitter awareness that was generated, over a dozen prominent bloggers wrote about Seed+ in the days after the event establishing awareness among tens of thousands of followers and generating over 550 comments from users.  And the Seed+ Twitter following doubled adding hundreds of followers.

And A Brand Goes Global…
But we’ve saved the best part of this story for last!  Shortly after the campaign started Benjamin and Rebecca left for London where they were visiting family.  While walking down a street there they ran across a small natural skin care boutique and stuck up a conversation with the owner and according to Rebecca it went something like this:

How’s that for “marketing advocacy?”

~ JPL

We believe in business karma.  The idea that business isn’t just about making money.  It’s about making money by doing WHAT’S RIGHT for others.  It’s about believing that if you do good things for other people’s businesses, good things will happen to your business.  It’s at the core of our Marketing Advocacy philosophy.

That has never been truer than in 2009 when a tough economic climate could have derailed us, could have led us to take our eye off the ball, disregard our philosophy, and do anything to make a buck.  But we didn’t.  We stayed true to our Advocacy principles and in a year when many struggled, we flourished.

We’re incredibly thankful for our friends, family, partners - and most importantly - our customers.

To give thanks to all of you we have arranged for a special gift:  an exclusive 25% Idea-ware discount on any bag at Sondra Roberts New York.  Simply visit the new Sondra Roberts website and use the coupon code “IDEA-WARE” at checkout.  It’s good for as many orders as you want from December 1 until New Year’s Eve. Enjoy, and THANK YOU!

Best wishes for a Safe and Happy Holiday from Idea-ware!

Idea-ware’s Own Social Media Maven to the Rescue!
As we mentioned in the last post, George and I would seem an unlikely pair to re-launch a women’s handbag brand.  But we had a secret of our own - a secret weapon: Janine Nickel.  She’s the one member of Idea-ware who lacks a Y-chromosome, but she very much possesses the “hangbag gene”.  Janine is also our resident social media guru and a prominent “mommy blogger” known in that community as “Twofermom“.  This combination of genetics and personality ideally positioned her to be a powerful social media advocate for Sondra Roberts and our “ace-in-the-hole” for this project.

A Social Media Campaign with a Twist
Janine knew she wanted to do something different, something memorable, something that would tap into the powerful “mom blogger” community and build significant awareness for Sondra Roberts.

She outlined a multi-stage strategy that started with establishing the necessary Sondra Roberts Twitter feed and Facebook page.  She also mapped out an aggressive blogger outreach program that allowed prominent bloggers to review select Sondra Roberts bags.  But the finale was an incredibly unique idea that tied it all together: a live video fashion show of mom bloggers modeling Sondra Roberts bags from her home!

Lights, Camera, Handbags!
Janine invited 15 prominent bloggers from the Washington DC area to meet at her home and model a wide selection of bags on camera.  During the event, various bags would be given away, the bloggers would be promoting the Sondra Roberts line on their own Facebook and Twitter feeds, and Twitter followers would have a chance to win bags featured during the show. Click here for a slide show of the event.

With nothing more than a laptop, a webcam, a few bottles of wine and a dining room table covered with beautiful bags,  Janine turned a social gathering of like-minded bloggers into a powerful weapon of brand evangelism.  At the peak of the event some 400+ people were viewing the live video stream of the event, and Twitter updates featuring “#Sondraroberts” reached a rate of almost 2000 posts an hour!  That put Sondra Roberts traffic on Twitter just shy of the launch of the new vampire movie New Moon which was opening at midnight that evening!  Truly an incredible accomplishment for the Sondra Roberts brand!

Results That Will Payoff this Holiday Season and Beyond
In the days that have followed the show, traffic to the Sondraroberts.com website has increased some 65% and, more importantly, the percentage who are new visitors to the site jumped more than 10%!  In addition, dozens of bloggers have written favorably about the event, the bags and the Sondra Roberts brand, generating positive impressions with thousands of qualified prospects and generating powerful “backlinks” to the site that will assist in search engine optimization efforts.

In addition to all this, Idea-ware will be unveiling a number of holiday promotions to incent Twitter and Facebook followers to promote the Sondra Roberts brand and stimulate sales.  This includes a special promotion for all of you - Idea-ware’s fans - for a special discount on a Sondra Roberts bag of your own this holiday.  That is…as long as you possess the critical “handbag gene”!  Stay tuned…

~JPL

Take Sondra Roberts New York, for instance.  This 30 year old boutique women’s handbag designer recently asked us to help them re-launch their e-commerce website and re-invigorate their brand.  For two guys who’ve never carried a handbag (well…I can’t speak for George), and who are more accustomed to working with technology brands, this might seem like a stretch.  But we confidently took on the project because we knew we could bring something different to it.  And we did…

Rebuilding a 30 Year Old Brand
In our case, knowing almost nothing about handbags actually proved an advantage. A fresh eye allowed us to see that every other handbag designer built their brand identity and messaging around product ATTRIBUTES - the quality of the leather and stitching, how trendy and stylish the bags were, the size of their collection, etc.  This made it difficult if not impossible to differentiate between them all in a crowded market.  So, we quickly decided Sondra Roberts needed to build their identity around the EXPERIENCE of holding their bags.

We spoke to a number of customers and asked them the kind of thought provoking questions that those more familiar with the industry might not have.  Such as, “What’s the best story you can tell us of something that happened to you carrying a Sondra Robert’s bag?”

What we found is that Sondra Roberts women feel like they are in on the best kept secret in women’s fashion.  They get stopped on the street and asked who makes their un-labeled bags all the time.  And because of the unique quality/value combination Sondra Roberts provides, they can buy collections of handbags - not just one or two - but one for every mood, one for every occasion, one for every woman they want to be.  This led us to a number of original brand themes and eventually the final tagline:

“For Every Me…There is Sondra Roberts”

From World-Class Showroom to World Wide Web
The next step was to bring this brand out from their beloved showrooms and onto the Web.  Sondra Roberts had recently deployed SAP as their ERP system and were using the SAP Business One as their e-commerce front end.  Our challenge was to build a shopping experience that resonated with the “For Every Me” brand and to have it ready for the holiday season just 8 weeks away.

Cognizant of both the power and limitations of the SAP system we designed a series of wireframes that would optimize the shopping experience, allowing shoppers to immerse themselves in the incredible diversity of Sondra Robert’s collection while at the same time quickly finding the right bag for their mood and style.

Wanted: Miami-area photographer who can do a photo shoot…today!
The final challenge was to get photography for the site that captured the essence of the brand and the experience of holding a Sondra Roberts bag and which would be appropriate for their Spring Collection.  We needed to shoot in Miami for weather conditions - and we needed to do it fast.  Not knowing any photographers in Miami we turned to Twitter, posting a request and getting a referral in just hours to the good folks at Red Square Photography. They did a phenomenal job shooting one of the Sondra Roberts employees as a model in settings that perfectly capture the essence of the brand.

Live in Time for the Holidays…and Oprah!!!
Days before production started we found out one of Sondra Roberts bags would be featured in Oprah’s magazine and we needed to have the site ready for that, even before the launch of the holiday shopping season.  Pressure was on.  With all products photographed and loaded into SAP, we applied our designs to the system, tested it all out, and launched days ahead of schedule, still within budget, and in time to get some some serious Oprah buzz!  The result of all this hard work you can see for yourself at http://www.sondraroberts.com.

Next up will be some serious social media promotion to drive traffic and build grass-roots awareness of the brand.  And we plan to do that with the same outside-the-box thinking and creativity that we brought to this part of the project too!

~ JPL

That’s what we managed to accomplish with GoS networks.  They approached us last month to assist in the launch of the company starting with a corporate identity, company name, logo, tagline and website.  The name GoS stands for “Guarantee of Service” a derivative of the phrase “Quality of Service” (QoS) well-known in the telecom and IT industries.   GoS provides a new kind of QoS that literally allows service providers to “turn on” a level of control over their traffic that was never before possible.  This inspired a stylized “o” in the shape of the universal “power” or “on” button which became the core of the logo.  It’s nice and clean and high tech.

But the most interesting part of the whole process was knowing who would be wearing this new logo.  It turns out that well-known PGA tour professional Padraig Harrington is associated with GoS Networks.  We are excited to have the chance to put our work on his sleeve.  The website is still under construction but as soon as we had the logo finalized it was on his shirt.  Padraig has been on a hot streak recently and we’d like to think the logo had something to do with it!

Here are a few shorts from last week’s tournament.  You know who we will be rooting for at next year’s Masters…

- George

Now They Can Rave To Everyone Else too!

Zpizza and its local store owners had already seen that social media networks and online marketing were a fit for their business when they came to Idea-ware. Several of their locations had successful Facebook fan pages and they had used e-mail marketing for years with great success.  What wasn’t working was traditional PR. Zpizza had received lots of press but it was difficult to track how that translated into new customers. Idea-ware developed a social media plan for Zpizza that included using Twitter and Facebook to better engage with their existing fans, and generate discussions and buzz to attract new ones.

Positive Mentions That You Can Measure

In less than two months Zpizza has seen their fan base on Facebook grow 50% from 830 to 1250 members and, more importantly, the fan ‘interactions’ have increased 33%. Idea-ware started using two Twitter accounts (@zpizza_dc and @zpizza_SoCal) to increase followers (750 added) engage with new customers, field questions, and even turn a brief negative customer experience into a lasting positive one. The result has been an overall increase in positive remarks about Zpizza in blog reviews, food-related forums, on Twitter and Facebook.

Looking to develop a social media strategy for your brand?  Let us show you what we can do, one Tweet at a time…

- Janine