Matrix Group International

Author: Joanna Pineda

  • Your Organization’s Voice Should Be Different Across Platforms

    If you’ve attended any of my webinars or follow this blog, you know that I advocate strongly against posting the same updates and information across different communications channels. I think it’s a waste when organizations simply post their press release headlines to their Facebook or Twitter pages. But Joanna, you say, “what if I want to educate my members and the public about one, burning issue or I want to promote a new event or publication? What if I WANT to talk about one thing across, print, online and social media for a while?”

    My answer is this: post about that one topic but change the perspective, voice and interactions depending on the platform.

    Say your organization is pushing for a piece of legislation on Capitol Hill. You could issue a policy statement and repeat that statement across all platforms. A more effective strategy would be to:

    • Post the policy statement on the website. This policy statement will likely have a formal tone and reflect the position of the entire organization.
    • Write a press release on the policy statement and send it to your media list. This, too, will have a more formal tone.
    • Post links to the policy statement on Twitter, but with differing headlines, highlighting different aspects of your policy. You could also post third party stories, facts and figures that support your position; in this instance, you would be curating relevant content to bolster your position.
    • Feature interviews with members and customers talking about why they support (or oppose) the proposed legislation on YouTube and your blog. These interviews will feature member perspective in their own voices.
    • Have the CEO write a blog post about why the issue is important to the industry and members. The tone of the blog post should be conversational and personal.

    If you are promoting a new publication or report, you could:

    • Feature the publication in your online store and what’s new section of your website. These descriptions should be compelling but more formal.
    • Post an audio excerpt on your YouTube channel and iTunes. The excerpt could be done by the author.
    • Post key findings and highlights to Twitter. The most effective tweets are thought-provoking and compelling.
    • Feature the publication on Facebook and sponsor a discussion with the author for a 7-day period. A discussion will allow a dialogue about the issue and foster a different kind of member interaction.

    Finally, if you are marketing a convention or event, you could:

    • Mail a 4-color brochure with full meeting information.
    • Mail and e-mail postcards (e-cards) that showcase the different benefits of attending the event. The tone of these pieces should be urgent and compelling.
    • Tweet conference news (number of exhibitors, confirmation of keynote speakers, etc.) and third party news that highlight the importance of the issues to be covered at the event
    • You could test different calls to action in e-mails and posts. Some calls to action could focus on benefits, some could inspire fear, while others could discuss opportunities.
    • Feature YouTube interviews or presentation highlights from the featured speakers.
    • Offer a hosted discussion with the speakers for a 7-day period on Facebook.

    Our jobs as marketers are so much harder because we are marketing to multiple generations, there is no one platform that allows us to reach all audiences, and people are motivated by different things. Having a layered messaging strategy that utilizes the capabilities of each platform and features different perspectives and voices will help you reach and connect with your audiences better.

    How about you? How are you marketing your products and services? And how does your message or approach change with each platform? What’s working?

  • The Prank of the Year or Why Green is the New Purple

    The Prank of the Year or Why Green is the New Purple

    It’s kind of a tradition at Matrix Group that when you go on vacation, especially if you’re gone for an extended period of time, you get pranked. When Dan went to Cancun for a week, he came back to find his area converted into a resort, complete with beach umbrella and inflatable pool filled with jello. When Maggie went on vacation, she came back to find 400 balloons in her area; it took a couple of hours to pop the balloons so she could reclaim her space.

    So when Maki and I went to the beach last week, what did the staff do? They pranked me and prank me good they did!

    I came back to find that my blog had been completely redesigned and rewritten. I became Jar Jar Binks, my signature purple was now green, and I had apparently been blogging about our new dress code and drinking on the job (if you know me, you know that I’m not much of a drinker). The net admins went to great pains to make sure that my new, green blog wasn’t available from outside the office.

    I was in shock initially. Then I panicked that the blog had actually been replaced. Then I started laughing hysterically when I realized I had been pranked and pranked hard.

    Check out the alternate version of The Matrix Files. (If the image comes in small, click it to make it full screen in your browser. Trust me, this will be worth it.)

    Kudos to Liz, who masterminded the whole prank, and the whole gang of people who designed, wrote, posted, and hosted.

    If you’re at familiar with some of the internal jokes at the office (purple is our signature color, we don’t allow shorts, yada, yada), you’ll get a chuckle at the posts. The writing is so good that I think I’ll recruit some new guest writers for this blog.

    If you’re shocked at the amount of time that goes into our pranking or that I even allow pranking, let me just say that pranking is great for office morale and productivity. The prank prep is done during personal time and it’s just plain fun.

    How about you? Have you pranked anyone lately? Share stories!

  • The Importance of Meeting Clients and Prospects on Their Own Turf

    The Importance of Meeting Clients and Prospects on Their Own Turf

    A few months ago, I went to Lowe’s to pick out new carpet for my basement. First, I had to check out some carpet samples so I could try to match the carpet on my stairs. Turns out the carpet I picked (even though they gave me a sample) was no longer available. So back to Lowe’s I went. The second carpet I picked was also not available. I finally picked a Berber I liked but couldn’t place the order on my 3rd visit because the estimator wasn’t available. When I finally got the quote, I was asked to come back in to sign the paperwork. At that point, I gave up. It was too hard to work with Lowe’s. And given my schedule (work, 2 boys, selling a house), I didn’t have time to make it back to Lowe’s.

    I remembered an advertisement from Empire Today. The appeal was that they offered to come to my house, show me samples and install my carpet the next day. So I went online on Sunday night and booked an appointment for Monday night. The sales guy came on time, helped me pick a carpet and asked what time I wanted the installers to come the next day. Amazing. And I didn’t even have to leave the house.

    This whole episode reminds me, once again, of the importance of meeting clients and prospects on their own turf. I’ve rarely landed an account where I didn’t take the time to visit the prospect’s office, meet the staff, walk around, and learn about their pain points. Yes, I can probably get good information over the phone and via Webex, but somehow, meeting prospects in their own office makes a difference.

    I just came back from a client meeting in New York City. Yes, it took all day because of the train ride up and back, but we had a fun and productive 5-hour meeting. While I don’t necessarily recommend marathon meetings like that, we had to pack a lot into the day to make the travel time worthwhile. But guess what? Meeting for five hours in person was enjoyable because of the amazing information the client was sharing, the conversation and the socializing during lunch. There’s no way to replicate that type of connection via phone and no way to hold an effective multi-hour conference call.

    When I get busy, my first inclination is to do a call instead of a face to face meeting. And e-mail is quick and easy when I don’t have time even for a phone call. But I fool myself when I pretend that I connect with staff, clients and prospects via e-mail and phone the same way I do when I meet them in person. I know it’s not practical or cost-effective to do all of my meetings in person so I aim for in person gatherings for the kickoff and midway through the project.

    How about you? Do you prefer in person or phone meetings? Voice or e-mail? And how do we steer our interactions back toward face to face in this busy, time-starved, electronic age?

  • Why a Redesign is Like Moving: Time to Audit Your Stuff and Toss, Toss, Toss

    Why a Redesign is Like Moving: Time to Audit Your Stuff and Toss, Toss, Toss

    My husband and I recently bought a new house. Even though the new place is slightly bigger than our old house, I was determined not to move old crap so I took the time to audit all of our stuff and toss out as much stuff as possible. During this process, which took months, I realized that moving to a new house is a lot like redesigning your website. Here’s how:

    Inventory and audit everything. During the move, I was amazed at the stuff that I “found” and the junk that I ended up tossing. It makes me think of a content audit we completed for a client recently. After delivering the Excel spreadsheet that listed all of their website’s content, the client said, “wow, there’s so much stuff that we didn’t realize we still had online.”

    Don’t just hire movers to move everything. A neighbor recently moved and she hired movers to pack up her entire house and move the boxes and furniture. Me, I prefer to do my own packing because it gives me a chance to edit, sort, and toss. With a redesign, I recommend that clients not ask us to just migrate everything because inevitably, we’ll migrate content that should be archived or we’ll put content into the wrong place and it gets “lost” forever.

    Use a move to re-organize the flow of your house or website. When Maki and I moved into our old house, the garage was pristine. Over time, the garage became a dumping ground for everything: old notes, out of season equipment, holiday decorations, overflow storage for kitchen items, yada, yada. Pretty soon, the garage was a mess and it was hard to find anything. With this move, I’m taking the opportunity to re-organize the garage so that everything has its place, the shelves are properly labeled, and like items are grouped together for easy access. Same with a redesign: don’t just dress up the pages, use the redesign as an opportunity to make it easier for your customers to find information and services. And label everything properly!

    If you haven’t used it in a year, toss! My mom always tell me to toss clothes that I haven’t used in a year. While this advice is not always practical (think winter coats and specialty items), I think it makes sense to put into storage, donate or toss things that my family no longer needs. Same with your website. Check your usage reports to see what content is just not getting visited. If the content is no longer relevant or out of date, you’re better off archiving the content offline or simply deleting it. In fact, old content can be a bad thing because Google can index it and serve it up to visitors, which can cause confusion and misinformation.

    Organizing takes time. This process has taken more time and energy than I had originally budgeted. So the moral of the story is to allocate enough time to do your content review, then double or triple your estimate.

    Get professional help. I’ve blogged in the past about how I worked with a professional organizer to get my house into shape. For the new house, I’m involving C. Lee from SimplifyYou early. She is going to help me figure out where to put mail, how to store kids’ games for easy access, how to organize supplies in the garage, etc. She can tell me what other clients have done and she can recommend products and solutions that would take me hours to research. With a website redesign, I recommend that clients work with us to create the content inventory, site map, migration plan, navigation and taxonomy. We’re able to do the work faster and we can draw on our experiences working with hundreds of other organizations.

    Don’t just make the new house a replica of the old house. Sometimes, clients ask us to redesign their websites, but they want the navigation, content and applications to look and work exactly the same way. What is the point then of the redesign? A new website, like a new house, will have similar functions (think kitchen, living room, dining room, etc. or About Us, Contact Us, Calendar, etc.) but the new site should have updated and improved design, flow, content and functions. Now is the time to create a really great About Us page, redo the site search, roll out some new publications and rethink the online store.

    The new house is a work in progress and it will take time to get it just right and feeling like home. But the time, money and effort will be more than worth it.

    How about you? When was the last time you moved and how did it go? Is it time to “move” or redesign your website to clear out the garbage and create a fabulous, new space?

  • I’m Waging the Good War Against Paper

    I’m Waging the Good War Against Paper

    Last December, my husband and I set up a managed account with one of the brokerage firms. We expected a few extra pieces of mail as the account ramped up. We certainly did not expect the flood of mail that started appearing in our mailbox as we received confirmations of trades and prospectus information from companies. The photo at left shows the 3 inches of mail that arrived from that one account in just one week.

    Once I realized what was happening, we quickly switched to e-mail confirmations and statements.I vowed to do more to reduce the paper tsunami that swallows my mailbox every week but then entropy set in and I just resigned myself to simply standing in front of the garbage can as I reviewed my mail.

    Well, turns out I have another opportunity to reduce my carbon footprint and save trees. We’re moving next week, which means I get to contact all my creditors and vendors to give them my new address. In the process, I’m switching to e-statements whenever I can. I like how Schwab retains my statements for 10 years. And I love that ExxonMobil is planting a tree in my name because I switched to e-statements for my DRIP. Wherever I can, I’m receiving bills through my online banking account and paying online.

    According to Matador Network, “The average person in the US receives nearly 11 pieces of junk mail each week, or 560 pieces a year. This amounts to 4.5 million tons of junk mail yearly, of which 44% goes straight to the landfill unopened and unread.” Apparently, eliminating US junk mail would be like taking 480,000 cars of the road!

    So what can we all do to reduce our paper consumption? Here’s what I’ve learned:

    • Opt out of credit card offers by going to http://www.optoutprescreen.com/; btw, this has the added benefit of making you less likely to be victimized by identity theft from people stealing these credit card offers and opening up accounts in your name.
    • Contact the Direct Marketing Association and opt out of about 75% of direct marketers’ lists by going to DMAchoice.
    • Configure your online banking account to send you e-mail notifications when you have a new bill and stop paper bills.
    • Take the time to cancel unwanted subscriptions and catalogs; this is the most time-consuming because it’s easy to just pitch the unwanted stuff in the trash but think of the trees you’re NOT killing by making the effort.
    • Print everything double-sided.
    • Watch what I’m printing. Before I hit print, I check to make sure I’m not printing unnecessary pages. I once nearly used up a ream of paper when I accidentally printed a search results page that had hundreds of pages of debug code. Ugh, that was not pretty.

    In doing research for this blog post, I found cute suggestions for ways to reuse junk mail as scrap paper, but I don’t believe that solves the problem: the trees had to be cut down in the first place. Besides, junk mail is some of the most expensive paper because it’s coated and printed in four color.

    My goal is to trim the crap that appears in our physical mailbox by 50% by the end of the year. I’ll let you know early next year if I met my goal. How about you? Are you overrun by paper? What are you doing in the war against paper?

  • The Matrix Minute is Born!

    The Matrix Minute is Born!

    Even though Matrix Group has had a YouTube account for years now, we weren’t doing much with it. Well this past week, we finally, fully integrated this platform into our overall marketing and social media strategy by launching a new series called The Matrix Minute.

    Why so late to the YouTube game? As I’ve explained before in previous blog posts and webinars, I believe that it’s important to create a layered experience across different media. In other words, don’t just post the same stuff to Facebook, Twitter, your website, YouTube, your blog, etc. Have an overall strategy, but take advantage of each site’s capabilities and culture to maximize followers across all platforms.

    Until recently, we didn’t have a clear idea of how we wanted to incorporate YouTube into our marketing, sales and client engagement strategy. We had videos from Matrix Group staff events, but we had reserved our Facebook page for information and posts about the project we’re working on and corporate culture. I didn’t want to use YouTube as another place to promote corporate culture. And until we hired a new Marketing Coordinator, we didn’t have the bandwidth to staff an active YouTube channel properly.

    But this past week, we launched The Matrix Minute, which is a series of interviews with in-house and outside experts who discuss web technologies, mobile technologies, social media, design and web development. Occasionally, we’ll feature local CEOs who will talk about leadership and what their organizations are doing to stay relevant and vibrant.

    Here’s how the Matrix Minute fits into our overall sales and marketing strategy:

    • As a company, we’re extremely committed to ongoing education for staff and clients so content-rich interviews make sense for us.
    • It’s a way to showcase the expertise we have within the staff.
    • It’s a way to leverage the expertise of our clients and partners.
    • It’s a way to continue demonstrating thought leadership.
    • We get to show off our video production capabilities.
    • YouTube is owned by Google and Google favors keyword-rich videos and descriptions so the channel is good for search engine optimization (SEO).
    • It’s a way to layer YouTube into our strategy in a way that’s new and different from what we’re doing on our website and social media.

    The Matrix Minute has also been a lot of fun.  So far, I’ve been doing all of the interviews and I’m learning a ton. Ray Stankiewicz, New Biz Manager at Matrix Group, is the producer and Melissa Bader, Designer at Matrix Group, does the video editing.

    We’ve got a half dozen interviews already online. For example, Jill Foster of Live Your Talk talks about videoblogging. Jennell Evans of Strategic Interactions shares her tips for managing remote teams. And Sherrie Bakshi of Matrix Group talks about why 2011 is the year to start a corporate blog.

    BTW, we call it The Matrix Minute, but the interviews are usually 2-3 minutes long. 1 minute just didn’t provide enough time for a meaningful interview and Matrix Minutes sounded goofy.

    I hope you’ll check us out on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/MatrixGroup) and you’ll rate, comment and subscribe. Tell us what you think of our latest initiative!

  • Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus

    Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus

    This circus is not just for kids anymore. You’ll be surprised to find today’s circus has fun for the whole family. Enjoy, and don’t forget the popcorn!

  • Thank Goodness Someone Bought Delicious or Why I’m a Prolific Social Bookmarker

    Some of you know that I’m a prolific social bookmarker. I use a social bookmarking site called Delicious to store and organize my Web bookmarks. I don’t use the bookmarking function in my Web browser because I use too many devices every day: my Sony laptop when I’m at work, my Apple laptop when I’m at home, and my iPad and Palm Pre smartphone from everywhere. By using a social bookmarking site, I have access to all of my bookmarks from anywhere.

    But what’s even cooler about social bookmarking is that my bookmarks are public (unless I mark specific links private, which I do when they’re links to sites related to my children or my friends), which means I can easily share my bookmarks with others. For example, I use the RSS feed from my Delicious account (www.delicious.com/jmpineda) to share my bookmarks on this blog (check the bottom, right column), and I encourage my staff to access my bookmarks when they’re looking for Internet statistics or case studies.

    Finally, I love that I can create a taxonomy for my bookmarks. I’ve carefully created a list of categories that I’m interested in and whenever I bookmark a link, I associate that link with one or more categories. For example, I categorized an article on optimizing your Facebook page for search engines under the tags of Facebook and SEO. I have 148 tags and I bookmark sites nearly daily.

    So I was very happy to learn that social bookmarking of choice, Delicious, which had been bought by Yahoo! several years ago and then put on the block recently, had been purchased by the founders of YouTube. You see, I started my social bookmarking life on a platform called Magnolia. I loved Magnolia and still think the user interface is better than that of Delicious, but January 2009, Magnolia suffered a huge data loss and I nearly lost all of my bookmarks. So I switched over to Delicious and I never looked back. If Delicious had gone under (which was a possibility if no buyer were found), I could have exported my bookmarks, but it’s always hard switching platforms and getting used to a new interface.

    If you haven’t yet discovered social bookmarking, I encourage you to give it a try. Not only are my bookmarks easily accessible, I have found amazing resources by checking Delicious’ top links and exploring the bookmarks of other people. It’s fascinating when thousands of other people have bookmarked your same links and equally interesting when you’re the first person to save a bookmark.

    How about you? Are you a social bookmarker? What’s your platform of choice?

  • iPad 2

    Love the slim form factor and sleek design! Also enjoying the front facing camera – be sure to try out the newest version of the Videolicious app!

  • The Ironworker Management Progressive Action Cooperative Trust Website Redesign

    The Ironworker Management Progressive Action Cooperative Trust Website Redesign

    The Ironworker Management Progressive Action Cooperative Trust (IMPACT), a labor management partnership between signatory contractors and Ironworkers, serves as a forum for both groups to address mutual concerns and encourage balanced solutions. The organization also has 11 regional advisory boards in the United States and Canada that support IMPACT’s mission and work to expand job opportunities in both countries.

    IMPACT wanted to use its website to better promote its resources, events and other services on its website, and encourage members to take advantage of these benefits. It also wanted to enhance its brand and position itself as a leading industry voice.

    Matrix Group:

    • Designed a navigation structure with a strong understanding of members’ needs. The new navigation makes it easy to access information about meetings, publications, grants, marketing and certification.
    • Developed a design that is beautiful, elegant and showcases IMPACT’s values of openness and collaboration.
    • Implemented MatrixMaxx, Matrix Group’s Association Management Software (AMS) to tie IMPACT’s public website to its member database. Now, IMPACT staff can easily manage information about their members, create and manage and meeting registrations and develop targeted mailing lists. Members can now manage their profiles, register for meetings and sign-up for mailing lists.
    • Created an online membership directory that is powered directly by the member database. Visitors can search for contractors, local unions and district councils.
    • Implemented the Expression Engine content management system to make it easy for staff to manage all aspects of the website without having any knowledge of html.

    Visit the Ironworker Management Progressive Action Cooperative Trust Website.