ClearVerve Marketing, LLC

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Posts Tagged ‘Clear Verve’

Get 100 Ways to Build Your Business

Monday, December 19, 2011 — 

 

Have you ever tried to think up new ways to market, manage, or build your business and found yourself at a complete loss for ideas? I think it happens to everyone. I have to admit, it even happens to us, despite the fact that we’re a marketing company. I’m not sure if it’s because we spend so much time being creative on behalf of others that we just run out of gas for ourselves, or if it’s because we spend so much time dreaming up new ideas that it’s hard to come up with something that feels truly revolutionary for ourselves.

Well, we’ve solved that problem! Last year, we came up with the crazy idea of trying to get 20 of our favorite thought leaders to share five ideas that would help businesses innovate, grow, or manage themselves better. We contacted a few people, who loved the idea, and our big project for 2011, 100 Ways to Build Your Business in 2012 was born.

After several months of hard work, we’re pleased to share these great ideas with you. The book includes thoughts on marketing/PR, web/social media, management, and video/photo, so you are sure to find something that is applicable to your business! Best of all, you can also sign up to receive a monthly tips from the ebook for the next year. (Because seriously, who can remember or implement 100 ideas all at once?)

You can download the free e-book and sign up for the monthly emails at the 100 Ways to Build Your Business website.

Our best wishes for a busy and productive 2012!

Christina Steder is the President of Clear Verve Marketing and works with clients to plan, create and execute marketing campaigns. Follow her on Twitter as @clearverve

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When you give, you get!

Wednesday, December 7, 2011 — 

 

Clear Verve Marketing was recently featured in a Profile in Philanthropy from BizTimes Milwaukee. These profiles, which appeared in the BizTimes Giving Guide, highlight the services of individuals in the Milwaukee area who have made significant contributions to the nonprofit community. Clear Verve, along with Catral Doyle creative and Welke Group, were highlighted for our Tri-Adathon work. You can view our profile, along with profiles of other generous individuals and some deserving nonprofits, online.

If you’re not familiar with Tri-Adathon, it’s a once a year opportunity for Milwaukee-area nonprofits to receive some really great pro-bono marketing work. Each year, we take applications from local organizations, select a number of projects to work on, and then shut down and complete these projects in a 24-hour work marathon. It’s exhausting and fun. It’s also given us the opportunity to meet some really great people and learn a lot about the many organizations that make our community a better place. The 2012 Tri-Adathon will be held in spring. Be sure to watch for our call for entries coming in March or April.

We don’t do Tri-Adathon specifically to get publicity, but it’s nice when that happens. Many thanks to our friend and client, Gary Ross from Community Health Charities of Wisconsin for nominating us. We’re looking forward to another successful creativity marathon this spring.

Here’s a video of our Tri-Adathon experience last year:

Christina Steder is the President of Clear Verve Marketing and works with clients to plan, create and execute marketing campaigns. Follow her on Twitter as @clearverve

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A new social media planning tool

Monday, December 5, 2011 — 

 

I recently spoke at an event for the Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee.  The event, called Social Media for Nonprofits, featured Wayne Breitbarth, LinkedIn expert, and me; and although it was targeted at the nonprofit community in Milwaukee, much of what we spoke about can be useful to for-profit businesses.

My presentation focused on the results of our recent Social Media Survey of Nonprofits ( get the results here) , specifically what nonprofits value about social media, and the challenges nonprofits face in implementing social media tools for their organizations. Because the Business Journal was kind enough to ask me to speak at this event, I wanted to be sure to deliver some high quality content for them. The result of my prep for this event is a new tool we hope you’ll find useful in planning your social media strategy. We call it the Ongoing Social Media Strategy Wheel.

One of the biggest challenges faced by nonprofit is getting others involved in the effort, either from a participation standpoint or from an implementation standpoint. This is partially because most nonprofits (64%) do not have a social media policy guiding the people charged with implementing social media. If your organization doesn’t have a social media policy, be sure to download our template so you can fix this!  A social media policy can help make it “safe” to build a team of people to get the work done, rather than relying on a single person (who often has other work to do).

The other challenge is finding time to plan a strategy. Although most of us would never think of spending advertising dollars without a plan or hiring a receptionist and not training that person on how to answer the phone, many people don’t think anything of just jumping into social media without a plan of action.  We hope our new document, the Ongoing Social Media Strategy Wheel, helps address the planning issue. When we created it, we wanted to be sure we recognized the following things:

  • Most organizations are already using social media in some way. It would be stupid for me to lead you through the perfect planning process for people that are not yet involved in social media. That process won’t work if you’re already participating because you can’t stop and undo what you’ve already done just to make a plan.
  • Planning is not a one time activity. You have to constantly reassess where you are at, look for new ideas, and pay attention to what is going on in the world.
  • The world doesn’t stop while you plan. You can’t take a vacation from interacting with your social media contacts while you think. You have to think and act at the same time.

The ongoing social media strategy wheel attempts to show this by using continuous circles. The inner circle illustrates the planning and reflection activities that most people forget. These activities are conducted internally and aren’t seen by the public, but they are very important because performing these activities will increase the effectiveness of the woare the public sees. The outer circle illustrates the activities that most people see. Both wheels are rotating constantly and at the same time.

We hope that this new document will help you continuously refine your communications on social media.

If you want to see the rest of the presentation from the Social Media for Nonprofits event (the ideas work for for-profits too), you can view it here:

Social Media for Nonprofits

Christina Steder is the President of Clear Verve Marketing and works with clients to plan, create and execute marketing campaigns. Follow her on Twitter as @clearverve

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I don’t have time to blog!

Friday, June 17, 2011 — 

 

This is a very busy week at Clear Verve. In the last two weeks, we landed three new clients, and just this week picked up projects from some former clients. While we are most certainly GRATEFUL for the additional work and glad to see our former clients call us when they have needs, we have a lot to do. On top of the increased workload, Susan is on vacation, and we are moving the office to a larger location at the end of next week. I’ve been working at home nearly every night just to keep up. In fact, I’m typing this as I sit in the bleachers during my kids’ swim lessons so I can get it done.

So, why am I taking the time to write this blog? There are a couple reasons. First, blogging is good for our company. Continually adding to our website via our blog is good for SEO and helps keep our Linkedin profiles and our Facebook page up to date. Also, we think it’s important to practice what we preach. Because we focus on working with professional service providers and not for profits, we are always talking to our clients about content marketing and sharing their knowledge. We tell them that blogs, newsletters, and social media are ideal ways to help them showcase their expertise and their personalities. We bug them (in a friendly way of course) to provide us with information we can use to generate content for them or to generate the content themselves. So if we expect them to do it, we should also be doing it. Otherwise, we’d be like the shoemaker’s kid with no shoes.

I hope that when your business gets busy, you can also remember to take time – even if it’s just a few minutes each day – to do something that helps your business grow. Small actions over time add up to great things. Don’t wait – the time to grow your business is NOW.

Christina Steder is the President of Clear Verve Marketing and works with clients to plan, create and execute marketing campaigns. Follow her on Twitter as @clearverve.

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Official Researcher for a Day

Wednesday, April 20, 2011 — 

 

A few weeks ago I shared a research paper that I wrote in grad school with two classmates about creating communities on Facebook. We wrote it almost two years ago, but since the timeline to get accepted into a conference is quite long, we just presented our paper at the Central States Communication Association (CSCA) Midwest Convention a week and a half ago. I thought I’d briefly share my conference-presenting experience!

Not one of the three of us has any desire to include the title of “researcher” in our future but we decided that getting accepted and presenting at a conference would be our last grad school benefit/hurrah of sorts. We went into it with an open mind, excited to present to other researchers outside of a classroom setting.

The week of our panel presentation, we met and ended up with more questions than answers. How much time would we have? Would there be a podium? A microphone? Would there be 20 people or 100 in attendance? Did people want to find holes in our research or would they be mostly supportive? At least the one thing we did know was our material, which we were grateful for. And that there would be three other presentations during our time slot.

Our presentation went pretty well, although we stumbled over one or two points that had become rusty over the past year. It was great to share with others at a communications conference where people actively research a variety of communication subjects. After all four presentations in our time slot, a respondent assigned to our session stood up to talk about how all of the topics were the same and then spent a few minutes on each paper in front of everyone.

The respondent seemed very impressed by ours and it was great to get that response from somebody who didn’t need to give us an official grade! Apparently the theory we chose was unique to communications but worked very well and our ideas could really be used in a variety of circumstances. Success!

It was really valuable and satisfying to see a research paper from infancy (about our shared interest in social media and nonprofits) to being acknowledged in the research world. While it would be amazing to have a published paper, the three of us are completely content and proud to have presented at a conference.

Have you experienced something similar? Was it everything you thought it would be and more?

Erica Gordon is a Marketing Associate at Clear Verve and also works part-time at a Milwaukee area nonprofit. She recently received her Communication MA from Marquette University. Follow Erica on Twitter @erica_g.

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What can you do with a hotel room?

Friday, March 25, 2011 — 

 

First of all, notice I said, “What can you do with a hotel room?” not what can you do in a hotel room. Big difference! (And not the subject of this post.)

Recently, a client approached us with an opportunity to do something really fun and challenging. They wanted to create a movie theatre-like experience to accompany a trade show at which they were launching a new product. Important customers were invited to the “theatre” for educational presentations on the new product. We’re really proud of the results, which you can see below. We transformed an ordinary hotel conference room into something that really looked like a theatre with a red carpet and a candy counter. We even popped fresh popcorn throughout the day, making it smell like a theatre too! We’re especially proud of the movie posters lining the sides of the room in which the new product took a starring role in some well-known movies from the past 50 years.

Take a look – we hope you find these photos inspirational!

Christina Steder is the President of Clear Verve Marketing and works with clients to plan, create and execute marketing campaigns.  Follow her on Twitter as @clearverve.

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It’s Tri-Adathon Time Again!

Monday, December 20, 2010 — 

 

It’s Tri-Adathon time again! A 24-hour pro bono frenzy!

Tri-Adathon is a 24-hour creative marathon which provides pro bono marketing communication services to Southeastern Wisconsin charities. It’s a joint venture between Catral Doyle creative, Clear Verve Marketing, and Welke Group.

During the inaugural Tri-Adathon, the aforementioned agencies completed a total of 37 projects for 22 Milwaukee-area not-for-profits in a 24-hour timeframe. This year, Tri-Adathon begins on the morning of February 17, 2011 and will wrap up just over 24 hours later with the presentation of finished marketing, graphic design, interactive, and public relations programs on February 18.

Tri-Adathon is seeking entries from not-for-profit organizations located in Southeastern Wisconsin that are interested in receiving pro bono marketing support (including PR or interactive services) from one of the participating agencies. Winning not-for-profits will receive solutions to their current marketing and public relations challenges. Potential support includes marketing strategy, graphic design, radio scripting, annual report design, event invitation design, TV strategy/storyboard, Web strategy/home page design, press kits, media plans, or interior design services. The participating agencies will work on individual projects and collaboratively on multi-faceted assignments.

Applications are being accepted until January 7, 2011 at www.triadathon.com.

The 2011 event is the second annual event with 88.9 Radio Milwaukee as a promotional sponsor.

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Survey Says!

Thursday, September 30, 2010 — 

 

Does hearing an unanswerable question over and over again make you want to find the answer? Well, it did in our case.

Professional service providers were coming to us for advice on social media use. But they wanted more than just the standard advice. They wanted to know how to deal with issues that are especially important in their industries. Issues like conflict of interest, confidentiality and providing general advice that could be misinterpreted in a specific situation.

So we collaborated with McGrath Marketing Associates to complete a survey and create an e-book: Social Media Habits of Accountants and Attorneys in Southeastern Wisconsin (and it’s free for anyone, by the way). We felt that providing professional service providers with the opportunity to learn from one anther would help everyone.

Here are some nuggets of information that we discovered:

  • Most professionals who don’t use social media prefer to use other methods of communication such as phone calls, texting or emails.
  • Some professionals have not begun using social media for work due to lack of formal training and understanding of how to use social media professionally.
  • Over 40 percent of participants said they did not use social media to communicate with any of their customers or business associates. However, participants were most likely to say they would use social media with those who they knew were users of the media.
  • An important goal of many firms is keeping employees’ personal communication separate from professional communication.
  • The relative equality in the number of people who use social media for personal and business communications indicates a strong need for social media policies at all firms.

Over 600 professionals between the ages of 21 and 60 participated in the survey, representing 144 different firms ranging in size from fewer than 50 employees to firms with over 1000 employees. The online study was conducted between April 26, 2010 and May 30, 2010.

The forward for the book was written by Todd Sattersten, former President of 800-CEO-READ and co-author of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. Todd also reviewed the book.

We learned a great deal from the survey and hope you will too. You can download the book here.

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One Nonprofit’s Strategy on Facebook

Monday, May 17, 2010 — 

 

This week’s post comes to us from guest blogger Caroline Anderson, Public Relations and Advocacy Coordinator at Meta House.

Meta House recently ran a successful fundraising and awareness campaign on twitter, as Clear Verve blogged about earlier. Afterwards, we were asked to participate in a seminar on ‘Social Media Strategies for Nonprofits’ at the BizTech Conference & Expo on Thursday, April 29. Our panel of four discussed various ways that nonprofits use social media like facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. and the audience seemed to appreciate hearing about our different approaches.

Clear Verve invited Meta House to guest blog and share our facebook strategy. Without claiming to know it all (especially because social media is always evolving…and no one likes a self-proclaimed expert anyway) here is the general approach that Meta House uses on Facebook. We hope that this blog will help other nonprofit organizations as they navigate social media!

Background on the organization: “Meta House helps women struggling with drug and alcohol addiction reclaim their lives and rebuild their families. Its model program meets the unique needs of women and their children, ending the generational cycle of substance abuse.” This is important to know, because unlike an organization that works with cute puppies or something else with easy crowd appeal, we are working against a stigmatized conception of drug addicts. By sharing their stories of recovery and the benefits of treatment, we help fight this stigma and increase support for our mission.

Frequency: We usually update our Facebook page about 4 times per week. If stretching to find news for an update, better to post nothing. If time is an issue because of other obligations one week, that’s ok. Conversely, if lots of exciting things are happening then we might post more…but we don’t want to flood News Feeds.

Audience: We have a diverse group of “fans” (now that we “like” pages, is the noun still “fan”?) including: Meta House clients, graduates, staff, volunteers, donors, sponsors, and new supporters of the organization. Some fans know a lot about us, and some may just have a general interest in women’s issues or addiction and treatment.

Content of updates: We try to post items that will be interesting for everyone, which isn’t always easy. We share about both big and small happenings going on in the various programs at Meta House – from a healthy baby being born to a topic discussed in one of our treatment classes. Our women and their children go on outings around Milwaukee, so we like to share about the fun places they visit, especially because most of it happens for free! Sometimes we put out timely requests if we need something specific, like diapers in large sizes or volunteers to help with a project.

Sharing other media: If we are featured somewhere else online, we share a link to it. After an event, we post photos and encourage people to tag themselves and friends. We have videos on YouTube featuring some of our graduates’ stories, and we post them in the hopes that viewers will gain a greater understanding and empathy for the women we serve.

Applications: We have a Causes page and have raised some money through that application, mostly during “America’s Giving Challenge” and when a supporter makes us the focus of their Birthday Wish. We tried to win on Chase Community Giving, but there was too much competition.

The person behind the updates: Remember how we said that we don’t know it all? Meta House was unsure of how to move forward with social media, as full-time staff didn’t have enough time and interns were too temporary. When I (Caroline) began working at Meta House part-time in September 2009, it was clear that it would be me or no one. I was hesitant because I had just spent three years with the Peace Corps in Cameroon, Central Africa and felt pretty disconnected from the fast-moving online world. However, I began learning by observing other nonprofits in action, attending trainings and webinars on the subject, and talking to new contacts. Christina Steder of Clear Verve also volunteered her advice! Slowly, I began to tweet and update the Meta House fan page. I’ve learned a lot from our followers- their responses are the best indication of what to adjust in your strategy.

We’ll end with a shameless request: please “like” us and suggest us to your friends as well! Thanks for reading.

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Ready, Set, Go!

Tuesday, December 15, 2009 — 

 

It can be difficult to write a story that is still being written.  But an in-progress story can often be more interesting than a completed story. After all, nobody knows how it will end! Our Clear Verve Marketing story is definitely a work-in-progress.

We decided to share our knowledge and our story with you on a more frequent basis through this new Promise Marketing blog.  Watch for weekly information on promise marketing, tips for small business owners, and guest blog posts.

When people meet us for the first time, we often get asked two questions.
1) What is the meaning behind your company name?
2) What is Promise Marketing?

We thought it appropriate to provide you answers to these questions to kick off our blog.

How did you come up with the name Clear Verve?
When Christina started Clear Verve, it made sense to have the company name represent our approach to marketing.  We believe marketing should be clear and jargon-free. Verve is the enthusiastic expression of ideas.  Thus, our company name reflects the dictionary definitions for these two words.

What is Promise Marketing?
It’s a phrase we coined! (That’s why we get to put the SM behind it.) We focus on working with those that sell the promise of future satisfaction in services, experiences, and causes.  Promise marketing can be a lot more challenging than traditional product marketing as services are intangible, can be hard to differentiate, and are often reputation-based.

What gives us Verve?
We are inspired by many things – nature, architecture, other professionals and organizations, reading, learning, as well as business and personal development.

What gives you Verve?
What inspiration gives you the verve you need for marketing your organization?  Let us know in the comments below (you can always leave anonymous comments if you wish).

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