Category: Managed Services

We are blown away by the innovative and thought-provoking  ideas filtering in through our 25K Gives Back Grant Contest.   Thank you to all nonprofits who have submitted so far!

It was tough for our team to select 1 spotlight entry with the influx of thoughtful ideas on how mobile marketing, mobile strategy and mobile technology can help their worthy causes.

But alas, we can only pick one spotlight each week and this week’s is Boston-based  Costs of Care.   Congratulations!

You can read their full entry overview with insight from independent judge Ephraim Gopin here.

“Medical bills are the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the US.  Doctors are the ones who determine what tests and treatments go on these bills.” – Neel Shah, Costs of Care

Honorable Mention

We also wanted to highlight an additional organization, Cat Adoption Team (CAT), of Portland, OR for their entry.  The challenges they face in engaging younger generations are reminiscent of what many community-based organizations face today.

Embarking on a mobile strategy would help determine how CAT could best utilize mobile technology to grow their brand, gaining new clients, volunteers & advocates and creating more forever homes.  Since they, like many shelters, have an on-sight Veterinarian and other pet-specific services, a mobile solution could also bring in more revenue and make them more self-sustainable.

We want to hear from you!  How do you think mobile marketing and technology could deliver more smiles, educate more people or create healthier environments in your community?

Reach out on Twitter or better yet, tell us how our 25K mobile grant will help better more lives.

Based on our early submissions, nonprofit leaders are passionate and energized about mobile changing the world.  They don’t have to sell us on it, we know mobile technology, while the delivery mechanism, is really about reaching and engaging PEOPLE as Seth Godin so eloquently said just this morning.

Meet Our Final 3 Judges 

We’ve selected 6 independent judges who are experts in various areas of the nonprofit sector to select the top 12 semi-finalists.   You’ve met our first three, now meet our remaining judges, all hailing from our Country’s west coast.

Representing Seattle, WA, Beth Ann Locke has been working for and consulting with nonprofits for over 15 years.  Her philosophy of creating and strengthening relationships with individuals to create sustainable fundraising programs is a perfect match in how mobile engagement is where it starts, then ENDS with fundraising.  Her expertise with major gift donors, advocacy and smaller gifts respondents, individuals within corporations, foundations and other agencies provides a unique yet critical perspective into how mobile delivers improved fundraising results, regardless of type or size.  Beth also offers up great book reviews – she’s happy to hear from you on twitter @fundraiserbeth

Frank Barry, based in sunny San Diego, is the Director of Digital Marketing at Blackbaud and primary blogger at NetWitsThinkTank, helping nonprofits use the internet for digital communication, social media and fundraising.   He’s worked with various well-known organizations including LIVESTRONG, American Heart Association & Big Brothers Big Sisters, to name a few.  He’s also dialed into national industry conferences such as SXSW, NTC & BBCon.  His video interviews are worth a peak.  Say hi on twitter – @franswaa

 

Finally, Erica Mills, Principal at Claxon, is a self-prescribed serial social entrepreneur, avid writer and lecturer at University of Washington.  She consults with nonprofits, focused on consistent messaging and brand personality. Marketing & messaging mojo is a guarantee when you work with Erica.  Her insight in these areas will be invaluable when considering how to fully execute a mobile strategy and fully understand how mobile marketing can drive results for various missions. She tweets too, find her – @ericamills

Alone, individuals cannot make nearly the impact of a team.   We recognize this truth at Atlantic BT and appreciate all our “Gives Back” Contest Judges:  Beth, Frank, Erica, Geoff, Joe and Ephraim.  Here’s to an amazing journey of discovery, educating and learning on how mobile strategy, marketing and technology can be, in the words of Untether.TV, the world’s greatest equalizer.

How can you educate, inspire and engage people for your cause?  Phone lines are open! 😉

 

Atlantic BT is on a mission to educate and inspire nonprofits on countless ways that mobile technology, mobile marketing and mobile strategy services can increase results – thus improving more lives.

To help us do that, and narrow the field to 12 semi-finalists who will move onto video submission round, I’m honored to introduce one half of our esteemed panel of judges for the Atlantic BT Gives Back Grant Contest.

Geoff Livingston, VP of Strategic Partnerships, Razoo

Geoff Livingston is an author, public speaker and marketing strategist who has dedicated his career to helping mindful companies and nonprofits achieve social change.  He brings people together, virtually and physically to affect change and achieve higher knowledge.  He was also a fellow presenter at this year’s Innogive conference,  giving an inspiring talk that began with:  “If you have a website, you must have a mobile strategy” (I’m paraphrasing) Take away?  He knows it’s critical for today’s causes to embrace  mobile technology, or risk a drop in results.  Geoff can be followed on Twitter at @GeoffLiving

Joe Waters, SelfishGiving.com 

When I think of Cause Marketing, I think of Joe.  His innovative ideas and inspirational campaigns, blogs and publications are well respected and causing a stir.  Not to mention, he’s pretty darn entertaining to talk to.

Joe has been a pioneer in educating effective usage of QR Codes, seen widely now in converting offline visuals into (most of the time) engaging mobile marketing content.   His upcoming book, QR Codes for Dummies, will be available June 2012. Joe tweets at @joewaters

Ephraim Gopin, Fundraisinisfun.com 

Ephraim Gopin is a web, fundraising & social media strategist.   He helps NPO’s create websites, write web content and design social media strategies so organizations can engage, cultivate relationships and, ultimately, fundraise.   His social media and fundraising blog offers constant thought-provoking ideas and Ephraim is a pro at Google+ and loves Google Hangout.  He’s a tweeting maniac at @fundraisinisfun

Feeling grateful that these talented and influential guys are on our Grant Contest judging panel helping to elevate the discussion on how mobile technology holds the key to improved supporter engagement.    They’ll be providing expert insight on how marketing, advocacy, fundraising and program delivery can be brought to new heights through mobile web, mobile strategy & mobile technology.

Check back soon when I’ll announce our remaining judges, completing our Grant Contest panel.  In the meantime, check out these guys and think BIG when considering what your organization could do with $25,000 worth of mobile talent.  Doesn’t your mission deserve it?

When Google’s brilliant engineer Navneet Panda figured out how to make their “machine learning” go faster, much faster, SEO changed forever.The math always wins and now, thanks to Panda, Google’s math always wins faster. I got asked a great question during our Wednesday night Internet Marketing Meetup. “What are the implications of Panda,” asked a real estate investor.

Google’s Panda algorithm updates, they’ve been happening for about a year, change everything, but there is one LARGE and IN CHARGE implication – CONTENT IS KING. Content’s being king is not a new Google message. I barnstormed the country with a tent, a box and a bullhorn preaching content, content, content in 2003. Be careful what you wish for (or preach). Now everyone knows many of my SEO secrets (not all). Content is getting crowded fast.

Luckily great storytelling is an art, an art not just anyone can do (yet). I heard my engineer/VC father once say, “I’ve made my living because I can write.” The same may be true for his son too. The Atlantic BT management team got a chance to see art of the tell at our Thursday management team lunch when former Gallo President Don Lockwood stopped by to share inspirational stories. Capturing Don’s ability to weave fable-like lessons into seamless engaging narrative is something every Internet marketer needs to be able to do with words, videos and pictures across their digital assets.

Story Telling How To Books
“No one reads online,” is one of my favorite myths. No one reads boring copy no matter where it resides. We read to be transported. We read to touch the divine. We read to empathize. We read to get outside of ourselves if only for a few minutes. We may have new more interactive ways to read, but why we read is always about story. Who can resist, “Let me tell you a story….”? The ten managers in our meeting on Wednesday couldn’t and neither will your website’s visitors.

Telling great stories is an art, an art anyone can learn with enough patience, work and diligence. Here are my favorite “How To Tell Great Stories” books:

#1 Made To Stick by the Heath Brothers
Internet marketers don’t just need to tell stories, we need those stories to sprout legs and walk around the world. There is no better “meme creation” manual than Made to Stick. Meme’s are cultural ideas that are, like a fire in a dry field, rapidly being shared across social networks, by word-of-mouth, in text messages and (if you are my luddite mother) via snail mail.

#2 Tell To Win by Peter Guber
Movie executive Peter Guber shares great stories of his amazing career along with tips on how you too can become a great storyteller. The emphasis here is oral storytelling like Don Lockwood at our management lunch, but it is easy to see how to carry Guber’s ideas to your site’s copy.

#3 Story: Substance, Structure and Style and The Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee
I love this book. It is intoxicating and you never watch movies the same way after reading it, but transposing to web copy has been a harder journey. For years I tried to find a way to fit McKee’s screenwriting tips into my web copy. Never got there but the journey wasn’t a waste of time and neither is reading Story.

#4 Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content That Works by Janice Redish
The web is a visual medium that is scanned more than read. Redish helps explain how to paint with words on your site. At a seminar the other day the leader said no one reads past 100 words. I disagree (if you just read that last sentence you are well past 100 words. I strongly disagree and know at least one “person” who will read every word on your site – Google’s spider. Wander around SEO Guru Bruce Clay’s site and count the words on a page and buy Redish’s book to learn the art of painting words to your site.

#5 Net Words – Creating High Impact Online Copy by Nick Usborne
An older (pre-social marketing) book with solid tips. Redish is more NOW, but I still return to Net Words every now and again for a refresher on Nick’s ideas. If you have to buy one “web writing” book buy Redish, but if Internet marketing is your chosen profession read both.

Telling great stories post-Panda is a must. If you missed our Internet Marketing Meetup about Panda’s many implications you may want to read my Best SEO Is No SEO ScentTrail blog post and glance through the Best SEO Is No SEO Prezi.

Marty

I”m excited to announce a first for Atlantic Business Technologies – perhaps a first for the web services industry!  We’ve embarked on a grant contest focused exclusively on leveraging mobile technology and mobile marketing to better society.    Submissions are already flowing in!

Today’s nonprofits, just like businesses,  must embrace and utilize mobile technology effectively to improve their bottom line.  Yet, unlike for-profits, whose primary goal is to turn a profit, nonprofits are about saving and enhancing lives – pretty much making the world a more awesome place.  Kind of important!

Mobile technology is most used for fundraising, right?

Fundraising is a huge part of how the mobile channel can help.  But engagement with new, would-be supporters is critical to sustained support.  What would you rather have,  a 1 time $10 gift in a pinch or  a life-long activist, turned volunteer, turned high net worth donor over the next several months?
That’s what I thought!

This $25,000 grant can be used for mobile strategy, mobile marketing, mobile technology services or a combination of all of them.  How will depend on who best tells their story on how mobile will better their mission.    Creations might include  mobile fundraising, mobile advocacy, branding,  mobile education, mobile health, volunteer management, the list is endless!

Our early entries include the following types of organizations:

•  Environmental
• International Relief
• Animal Rights

Not quite ready to submit your killer mobile idea?  You’ve got some time to think on it.
Join us on Facebook for fun & informative discussion to get those creative juices flowing.   Please be kind and share.  The more involvement we have the more learning will be had by all involved.   What are you waiting for?

If you don’t know Gartner you should. Gartner is one of the smartest Internet marketing and IT trends “think tank” consulting firm. You could lose a lot of sleep figuring out if Gartner, Forrester or BCG (Boston Consulting Group) is the BEST “write the white paper, sell the consulting services” rock and roll band. U2, Stones or Zepplin? It comes down to personal preference.

I like Gartner for the IT slant into Internet marketing, Forrester for the forest view (sorry about the pun) and BCG for their ability to matrix seemingly disparate stuff. As much as I love these guys I don’t usually recommend their sites. Most of their sites tend toward the overcrowded textual, engineering side of the brain (Gartner is the worst “too much too fast” offender).

How many engineers you know who do more with less? My dad is an engineer and more with less isn’t in his vocabulary. I could go on (and on) about heroes, hierarchies and navigational taxonomy but let’s do that another day. Today let’s admire a STEAL THIS feature hidden in Gartner’s underbrush – steal their MY ALERTS feature (example below).

Why am I excited about his little gem hidden so well in the weeds? Here is why:

• Gartner My Alerts is the best kind of content curation (OPC)
• Easy to Create
• Low Cost Way To Profile and Wrap The Site

OPC
Other People’s Curation is the cheapest curation there is. The cousin of UGC (user generated content), OPC is a magical idea and executed so beautifully simple, so innocuous here (I would buzz up something as cool as this too much so Kudos to Gartner on the sneaky restraint they show here).

Easy To Create, Easy To Use Website Feature
The genius of Gartner’s My Alerts area is your customers provide the keywords and tags and you just do what they tell you. Better have GREAT internal search to even think about firing or creating a cool but resource hog feature like this btw. Easy on the front-end probably represents some imagination and pain in the back-end, but not a HUGE leap for most sophisticated internal search algos like Endeca or whatever Adobe is calling the old Omniture now.

Low Cost Profiling and Segmentation
We live in a time of over abundance and hyper relevance. Google’s Panda demands relevance, email marketing is all but over UNLESS you are shipping relevant messages and social is relevance on steroids. Here comes Gartner with a cool new feature that doesn’t break the bank to create and hits the new Internet marketing and web development Nirvana – do a little get a lot. What could you get from such a cool internal search modification?

• Personas and Profiles for anyone using My Alerts
• Enough raw data you should be able to model the rest of your ecosystem
• Conversion rates are bound to go up
• Site heuristics are bound to improve (lower bounce, higher time on site, more pages viewed)

If you do what I do for a living (Internet marketing and someone please explain that to the moms) those bullets above = MONEY. In my last gig a .5% improvement in cart abandonment meant $1M bucks to the bottom line and that was BEFORE Google’s Panda’s “change the SEO universe” algorithm changes. Double my estimate now since Google values sites MORE when their heuristic KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) improve When KPIs such as Bounce Rates, Time On Site, Pages Viewed, New vs. Returning improve quality scores go up and Google-life gets better. .

The other cool part, and I suspect this is what drove Gartner to create such a new feature, is we are about to be knee deep in cool curation tools. HTML5 and CSS3 mean teams like Atlantic BT’s can make websites do magical, magical things. I keep insisting we aren’t in the “website” development business anymore. Atlantic BT creates platforms, platforms capable of wrapping around visitors with dynamic zones, internal search feeds fired from click path data and enough predictive modeling that we approach Isasc Asimov’s Foundation promise of predicting the future – at least at the macro level.

We are all more predictable than we realize, read Bursts by Barabasi to understand just how scary predictable we can be. Our mathematical patterns can be detected and built upon by smart Internet marketers. Yes I heard the gasp of “privacy scare” too.

Trust Internet marketers because we NEVER look at individual data. Individuals cut out from the pack (no matter how small and relevant “packs’ are getting smaller and smaller) are outliers. The stack, the group, is what we analyze and try to understand. Internet marketers spend our lives thinking about how to make life better for shoppers, visitors or readers. Granted we spend all this time thinking about you because it helps US, but you the customer, you the visitor, are in control. We serve you.

Steal this cool My Alerts feature from Gartner. I bet you lunch “alerts” and “curation” are about to be LARGE and IN CHARGE in your Internet marketing. If they aren’t then you better let me buy lunch (lol).

Marty