Inspiration: IdeaStorm

We've talked in the past about how important social and interactive media can be for not only pushing your brand's message out to the masses, but perhaps even more importantly as a tool to LISTEN. Comcast helped to pioneer this idea with the Twitter account @ComcastCares, which allowed them to identify users with problems, concerns or questions and address them immediately. Since then, multitudes of corporate Twitter accounts have been established hoping to use this open medium as a way to have more of a two-way conversation with their public, including companies like Dell, Zappos, JetBlue and Honda.

Dell recently took the idea of using interactive and social media even further by creating an online effort allowing customers to contribute their ideas for how to improve Dell products and services. The effort is branded Dell IdeaStorm and is centered around a website at ideastorm.com, but also includes a Twitter account (@IdeaStorm) and presumably a PR push and support in other Dell promotional materials as well, not to mention Dell's countless other Twitter accounts. The IdeaStorm website gives customers an easy way to contribute their ideas and voice any feedback or frustrations they might have, but also allows them to promote and demote the ideas that others have contributed that they feel strongly about.

The key here is that today's consumers want to have a voice. In order to have a successful brand (particularly consumer-facing) it's crucial to allow consumers to take ownership of that brand. Dell does a great job with this branded, integrated effort because it both allows customers to have their voices heard, but also acts as a vehicle for Dell to learn what consumers want. The knowledge they are able to take from this will not only help them in new product development, but it will help them create a successful, consumer-focused brand.

Shameless plug: There's a good chance a similar strategy could be taken with your brand. Interested in the possibilities of using interactive and social media to better communicate with your consumers? The Sutter Group would love to show you the possibilities. Contact me at garret[at]sutter-group[dot]com or on Twitter at @SutterGroup.

by Garret Ohm

Post a comment Email Garret Ohm

Central Penn site up in an instant (almost)

Our friends at Central Penn Health & Fitness came to us recently with a challenge: Launch a website for the newly remodeled club in a week or less. Oh, and can you develop a new visual brand identity for us while you're at it?

Our team accepted the challenge and recently launched a great temporary landing page for the 40,000 square foot Harrisburg, Pennsylvania club. The site establishes a fresh, new visual brand identity reflective of the personality of the club and includes a revamped logo that preserves some of the existing equity the brand had accumulated throughout the years. While the site is simple and will be fully developed into a robust, dynamic and information-rich site in time, this temporary landing page succinctly makes the case for Central Penn as one of the area's premiere health and aquatic centers, and invites interested visitors to sign up for a free 3-day "wellness pass" by completing a form that further qualifies prospects for Central Penn membership staff.

Visit the site HERE, and stay tuned for more great work from The Sutter Group on behalf of Central Penn Health & Fitness.

by Garret Ohm

Post a comment Email Garret Ohm

TSG Brings Bioscience Brand To Life

We're happy to be finishing up a new integrated marketing communications exercise for ReGenX, a Washington, DC-based bioscience startup. ReGenX is a biologics company focused on the development of gene therapy as a platform for advancing human health. (Read more about biologics HERE)

The company produces a type of proprietary viral vector, which is a microscopic tool that molecular biologists use to transfer different kinds of genetic material into cells. This transfer allows for advances in biotherapeautics, drug discovery, vaccines, target identification and target validation. These are all REALLY important things for fighting disease.

Our goal for ReGenX was two-fold: First, we wanted to clearly establish ReGenX as a reputable player in the cellular biology space. We accomplished this by crafting a brand identity that established credibility and clearly spoke to the company's purpose and service offerings, in addition to linking the company to technological developments from the University of Pennsylvania and a team of well-respected scientific advisors.



We also wanted to create a range of consistent, polished marketing materials that makes it easy for cellular biologists to understand ReGenX's product offerings and provide a clear path to purchase. One of the key tools we created was http://www.regenxbio.com. Clean design, simple navigation and well-organized content converge to allow users to easily find their desired information and the integration of a NetSuite enabled form allows them to easily request a quote.






We're extremely proud of the work we've done for ReGenX and look forward to continuing to support them. Interested in finding out how we can help you craft a new brand from scratch or reenergize an existing brand? We'd love to talk.

by Garret Ohm

Post a comment Email Garret Ohm

Clark Construction 2.0

It’s with great pleasure that we announce the launch of a new website for one of the nation’s largest commercial construction firms, Clark Construction, based right here in the Baltimore-Washington region. It’s now incredibly easy to peruse Clark’s impressive portfolio, see the latest news releases, and learn about the company’s history and long-time commitment to quality. Although there is a lot of content in the site (hundreds of projects and news releases, and thousands of photos), it is well organized and logically broken up for ease of navigation. This contributes to the site’s clean, easy-to-navigate feeling.

The new site features a number of Flash and Javascript elements.  Two of the most notable are the interactive company history timeline, and the interactive commemorative Clark hardhat.  The site also features video integration and search engine friendly dynamic text replacement (which is a fancy way of saying that we were able to use a custom font, as opposed to the traditional web-based-fonts, for parts of the site without losing any ground with search engines like Google).

The site was also designed to be incredibly easy to maintain. A custom-built backend CMS enables the Clark users responsible for maintaining the site’s content to easily add and update projects, awards, news items and photos—with little or no HTML knowledge.  The content can be linked in one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many relationships (for example, one award can be linked to many projects). A custom-created photo uploading tool enables the user to select which part of the photo to crop and use, while maintaining proper aspect ratio and respecting size limitations. Once the photo is uploaded, the user can even adjust the photo’s sharpness to their liking by using a simple and intuitive interface.

The site was built with standards-compliance in mind and validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional. If you don’t know what that means, it’s ok. It’s web developer speak for, “We take pride in our coding and meticulously make sure it is done correctly.”

We’ve enjoyed working with Clark on this project to deliver a site that is in line with the caliber of work they do, and we’re pleased with the satisfaction they have expressed to us. Please visit www.clarkconstruction.com

and let us know what you think!

by Aaron Waldon

(2) - Post a comment Email Aaron Waldon

Joustmas

Everyone that has ever played the arcade classic Joust should be familiar with this game! Nostalgic fools that we are, we tried to keep this game as close to the original as possible while giving it a facelift to fit with the holiday theme. We hand illustrated each frame of animation, swapping out reindeer for the flying ostriches and elves for the knights in the original game. We also thought it would be fun to swap the hatching eggs in the original with exploding presents. We traded the lava pits in the classic with a snowy winter wonderland, too. We even recorded our own original taunts and sped them up (a la The Chipmunks) to give them an elvish sound.

This year, we wanted to encourage some friendly competition out there, so we added a scoreboard to the game, using PHP and MySQL to link to a database on our server. Just enter your initials at the beginning of the game, and see if you can make it to the top. Go ahead, beat me if you can!

Click here to play it yourself. Bring it!

by Buzz Napper

Post a comment Email Buzz Napper