Open D is Presented on Discovery Channel

On July 10, 2015 Open D Community Builder appeared on Discovery Channel as part of Newswatch TV's weekly program. Newswatch TV contacted us mid June interested in showcasing Open D within their upcoming broadcast.

Interested in, "Exciting new products and companies that are separating themselves from the pack", Newswatch TV worked with our team to produce what we think is a great segment.

As a young Independent Software Vendor (ISV), Open D is enjoying the challenging and exciting early days of breaking into the business software market. This latest production, airing on Discovery Channel has been a terrific experience and a fantastic opportunity for exposure.

The segment included our principle developer Ross Bartlett and new Open D account holder Kayla Miller at Sheepdog Tactical describing the benefits Open D offers her retail store. The segment is available at http://newswatchtv.com/opend-071015.html and shown below.

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Open D Joins Start Up Canada

We are proud to announce that Open D Inc. has become a member of Start Up Canada. Startup Canada is a grassroots network of entrepreneurs working together to build an environment for entrepreneurship in Canada.

We could not be happier here at Open D, as our principle goal is to help small business and entrepreneurs have a fighting chance at success in this complex business world we currently all occupy.

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Open D Community Builder - Spring 2015 Release

New features include full automation and customization. Start growing a community of like minded and engaged people.

After months of development and testing, the 2015 edition of Open D Community Builder is available to the public. Create your Freemium Open D Account here: http://opend.me/  

Open D Community Builder is a new approach to business contact relationship management (CRM) and engagement marketing.

Developed to provide organizations a more inviting and rewarding communication environment for their audiences, Open D allows you to augment your web postings with engagement opportunities. These engagement opportunities come in the form of polls, surveys, and discussion forums that your community will want to share within their social networks.

Social network sharing by your audience is the most cost effective way to grow a community of people interested in your organization. Your community grows while Open D Community Builder provides you detailed analytics and demographics that betters your ability to manage your organization. 

Open D also manages your site communications allowing message assigning to staff and audit-able communication threads. It's all kept in order, and easy to manage.

It's all about relationship building when it comes to your on-line community. Open D provides you a fast and manageable environment to conduct your relationship building.

We're very proud of the cloud-based application we have developed and hope it helps you and other organizations establish more engaged and rewarding relationships.

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What Level of Community Engagement Do You Expect?

In this modern on-line marketing age, you the business owner, must understand what level of engagement you can expect from your community. Understanding what engagement model your business or organization is best suited for can have a great impact on your community's activity and growth.

Community engagement varies depending on the environment your visitor finds themselves. For example, gaming applications such as Clash of Clans or Candy Crush, requires minimal engagement. Players make brief contact with other players sharing little, while the app repeatedly offers the player the opportunity to purchase addition gaming upgrades. The ever advancing game levels combined with the interaction with other players establishes: rewarding involvement, builds familiarity, and creates a sense of dedication within the player. With all that established, a "single click" is all the game developers need to return e-commerce profit and sustain their community's engagement with the app for extended periods. If only it were that simple for the rest of us.

For the rest of us, the engagement model we choose needs to reflect the nature of your business. 

In the incredibly competitive retail industry we have seen a handful of engagement opportunities evolve and presented to buyers. Opportunities such as: Product reviews, social media sharing, and "Sign up for Our Newsletter" seem to be the limit of the engagement model most retailers have currently adopted. But is this the best model to adopt?

Whatever happened to the "suggestion box"? Stew Leonard's Dairy, which opened in 1969 in Norwalk, Connecticut, introduced a simple suggestion box to engage their customers and gain valuable market knowledge. Stew reviewed suggestions from his customers daily and followed up on many of them with interviews to better understand their thinking. He then implemented those that made sense to him and in turn empowered the suggestion provider to spread the word (social sharing) that "Stew used my idea". This simple engagement model turned customers into advocates for Stew Leonard's and resulted in the creation of the single most successful (per unit) food store in the United States.

Within our modern on-line world, a "suggestion box" like engagement model should be a simple thing to create. Retailers need to listen, respect, and treat their customers as people who have knowledge they desperately need to remain competitive. The question is;

why are retailers not engaging their customers in a more rewarding manner?

Clubs and members based organizations support one of the highest engagement type models. Members of organizations are largely prepared to offer their vote, or opinion on all "club" related topics. They have a vested interest in the organization and are prepared to build upon that investment by participating and sharing. The American Diabetes Association is a prime example of how people with a vested interest turn into advocates for the organization.

Members require an engagement environment that is possibly private and secure, one that stimulates knowledge sharing, and one that allows the coordinators of the organization the ability to easily compile the engagement of members into meaningful results. This ability for organizations to deeply engage with their community makes organizations with modern communication strategies thrive. Unfortunately many members based organizations simply utilize forums and e-mail as a means to accomplish much of this. Problems using this engagement model begin to arise when the organization grows to a point that returning data is typically unrewarding due to the volume of scattered results. The question is;

what do you do when the returning data is too much to manage?

Businesses and organizations need to understand what level of engagement they require form their on-line community to sustain and grow their organization. In this ever evolving 21st century communications and marketing field the businesses and organizations that recognize that community engagement is key to success need to determine what engagement model best serves their mission.

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Exploring Neo-Marketing in the New Era of On-line Communications

Exploring new marketing options for an era that features the burgeoning potential of social media and Internet realities.

Albert Einstein: “A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new”.

Introduction
In the “good old days”, much of marketing consisted of the Small Business boss saying “Just design and print 500,000 one page flyers, along with colourful brochures and some doorknob hangers. Then, get the stuff out to where customers seem to be”. In rare cases, the boss would arrange a press conference followed by a printed press releases which were also widely distributed.

Printed paper was the key component. The stuff had to be legible, multi-coloured and slick. On reflection, it didn’t much matter that more than 90% of this material went directly into trash cans. As to results, a 2% return was considered acceptable, and the paper flow continued. Somewhere in the 2% were actual sales. That was all that mattered...... the sales.

Changing the Game
But now, with the advent of social media, the Internet, and changed methods of communication and distribution, there is an implicit and compelling need for small business to change it’s marketing philosophy. The bland and the impersonal, must be replaced by more focused, more efficient, and more respectful marketing.  

The Neo-Marketing Model features radical change. It’s very essence is the two-way Internet-based communication with clients and customers builds relationships. It is direct and it is personal. It includes more focused and more economical downward “telling” for known customers/clients. It generates an informed counter-flow of “listening” and an upward stream of information from a knowledgeable client/customer base. The resultant dialogue is rich in shared information from two perspectives: the seller and the buyer. There is a more meaningfully connection. Shared and caring contact, about new and modified products and services or whatever builds your relationship.

Thus, the upward/downward capacity encourages this rich flow, and it can stimulate and reinforce rich dialogue both inside and the outside of the organization.... Now that’s marketing.

But wait! There’s more!

Just as marketing is crucial to business success, so is community engagement.  Meaningful community engagement techniques are available now so that Small Business can monitor the likes, the dislikes, the opinions, the trends and the demographics of its customer and contact base. The big data.

This is the kind of monitoring that was impossible when using the “scatter-gun” approaches in the “Good Old Days”. New kinds of information flows can feature “Opt-in” options.  This allows and encourages opinion-based participation back and forth, up and down. And, this information can be readily analyzed to show results from a range of perspectives. 

As noted earlier, 2% returns were the historical yield rates. In comparison, Opt-In rates using current technology can push these numbers “off the chart”. 

In addition, Opt-In allows customers and contacts to become more engaged, more loyal, and more involved. This kind of relationship marketing can mean the difference between educated decisions and blind ones for any organization.

Albert Einstein:
“We cannot solve problems by using the same kind of  thinking we used to create them”.

Clearly there is a need for new approaches to marketing.  Enlightened managers must move away from outdated, Email based "blast" contact communication and marketing methods. These approaches include:

• Dynamic up-to-date access to customer base;
• Visual analytics that show at a glance the current profiles of customers both individually and collectively;
• Capacity for Polling on current community issues
• Public forums that share views and experience
• Appropriate use of social media that is based on valid awareness of its strengths and weakness
• Bottom up designed community engagement with the resultant two-way communication producing a wealth of beneficial information.
  
  Neo-Marketing. It’s time has come.

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The Benefits to Slowing Down the Internet

“It's Sort of Like Drinking From a Fire Hose”. 
Too much information, too many locations, too fast to manage.

Many business owners, managers and other organization leaders have expressed their frustration with the transitory nature of the internet.  They have tremendous new ways of communicating with their audience of contacts and customers, but the resulting communication becomes scattered within emails, social media pages, blog postings, text messages, etc.  And none of this communication sticks around on the surface for very long.

Facebook, Twitter, blog postings and other social media sites have an ongoing media stream. Some media streams flow fast and some flow slow. For example, a Twitter posting containing a link to an article published in a blog, will likely only have a lifespan of a few hours before the posting is bumped down to make room for other postings in the users Twitter feed.

A blog on an organization’s site has a slower flow, but in time, postings invariably disappear off the user’s screen as new blog postings are added by the organization. Commenting on, and social sharing of the article effectively stop when not on the front page.

The only manageable takeaway an organization gains from all this communication effort, is a contact list of some individuals that have crossed its path. But how useful is that today?

For some time, contact lists have been beneficial for organizations. But with anti-spam legislation being implemented and the public’s general scorn for spam, the contact list has little to offer.

What organizations need today is a way to not only capture these contacts, but also give them an environment to develop and manage relationships that span greater lengths of time. This “slowing down” of the Internet can benefit organizations as they learn tremendous insights about their community’s interests and demographics as they have the time to engage with their community.

This environment must be inviting to the community, and it must be manageable by the business.

To be inviting to users, this new environment will give the user choice as to which vertical market subjects they subscribe to, and how they wish to be communicated with (ie. via email, text messaging, or social media sign up). The user will be able to engage with the organization and other users, sharing knowledge, images, videos and more in a two way communication environment that observes respectable dialogue.   In turn the organization will be able to “chair” discussions, provide information in multi-media form, ask questions and gauge responses to ultimately generate informative metrics on their community’s likes, dislikes and interests.

Managing all of this will be within a single secure cloud location that acts as a time capsule for the organization’s engagement with contacts, whether that engagement results from blog postings, social media sites, emails or other published content. The organizations community engagement will all be centralized where the organization can analyze and extract beneficial knowledge to better the organization.

Slowing down the Internet gives an organization countless opportunities to learn what works and what doesn’t work when engaging their on-line community.

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CASL is Launched and Only a Small Number of Businesses are Prepared

The Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation has many small business wondering what to do next. According to the Globe and Mail only 21% of Canadian businesses surveyed claimed they were CASL prepared. Those preparations largely amount to new ways to encourage contacts sign up for the businesses mailing list in a CASL compliant manner.

The results however are less than encouraging. Many businesses have reported less than a 5% return signup rate. A new approach to contact growth needs to be adopted.

The advice provided by many marketing advisors is to create and publish compelling content that will attract new contacts. This is an excellent suggestion, and something all businesses should be doing, but it doesn't necessarily replace the many contacts a business once had.

A new approach we call Neo-Marketing, incorporates the suggestion of publishing compelling content, but also utilizes a bottom-up designed community engagement application that invites participation and sharing by the business' community.

The above model demonstrates the Neo-Marketing approach needed to produce business contact numbers similar to those in a pre-CASL on-line environment.

Begin by publishing "Share Friendly" content within your web presence. Ensure to incorporate an Open D engagement page into your published content inviting your audience to participate in a poll, survey, or discussion.

Post to your managed social media sites, being sure to apply appropriate tags to your postings to ensure your published content will be found by those looking for your particular product or service.

Lastly, post your content to social media site groups that are locations where your audience frequent. This will direct traffic to your site where you have the opportunity to add the visitor to your community. This is where using a bottom up designed community engagement application like Open D separates your organization from other contact management solutions.  

The Open D application allows your site visitors to choose what subjects of interest they like, and how they wish to be contacted. The application acts like a net capturing, up to and over, 20% opt-in rates from your website traffic.

By following this Neo-Marketing formula & driving traffic to your site, where Open D captures them, small business's can see real contact numbers grow.

This new approach to on-line marketing creates more contact, more loyalty, and longer retention times.

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