• Select your language (I personally select randomly to mix it up a little)
• Enter PIN (glance over your shoulder to make sure your friend isn’t peeking)
• Select transaction type
• Select account
• Indicate amount (grumble about the increments and/or limits)
• Agree to fee (does anyone stop at this point?)
• The machine wishes you a happy birthday
• Your cash is provided below

Yes, I know, most of us don’t expect our ATM machine to wish us a happy birthday, let alone break the standard protocol that we’ve all become accustomed to over the years. But this seems to be the case with Wells Fargo ATMs, as a friend pointed out to me recently. I thought this was pretty cool and so did he – enough to tell me and most likely a dozen other people about it.

So I poked around to see what else Wells Fargo is doing across other interactive platforms and found the start of a well executed Twitter communication strategy. It seems, for whatever reason, that Wells Fargo had the internal foresight to grab their @WellsFargo account as early as April 2007, but have yet to tweet more than 5 times since April 2007. The bio on that account states “We’re holding our name for now, but hope to participate soon”.

On the other hand, Wells Fargo has another Twitter account, @ask_WellsFargo, with 6 Wells Fargo employees taking turns at the helm. The six are using short signatures on their tweets to indicate who is tweeting. (i.e. ^SS)

I’ve helped implement what seems to be simple social/interactive elements like this into companies big and small – so I can only imagine the amount of politics and coordination that went into both examples of Wells Fargo embracing technology and social trends to create a bond with their customers. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on them, although it would take much more than that to get me to switch banks from USAA. (big fan)

A retail advertising agency that I’ve been working with lately was in need of an updated web presence to visually align with their new corporate branding and addition of an interactive offering.  Knowing that the company was undergoing change, keeping the site informative for prospective clients, but vague enough to allow the company to make changes to their staffing, methodologies and offerings was important.

Working with Walter Stevenson, I directed the development of this simple site, which showcases the agency’s passionate client endorsements.

When I set up my email on my iphone, it was rather simple and intuitive, as is the case with many Apple products. One issue that became immediately apparent to me was the way that I had my desktop email folders set up and how organizing your email for the iphone is a must if you want to use the device efficiently.  I have been using, what I now realize, a silly, convoluted system of sorting my emails into folders based on Outlook rules – in an effort to maintain control over my inbox.

After a discussion with a former colleague, I thought through a way to deal with organizing your email – “The Empty Inbox Method” – and I can attest to it working (at least for the last week it has). I’m not saying that I’ve discovered something revolutionary or even anything new – I’m just so happy to have an empty email inbox and less stress in my electronic communications.

This is the basic system:

The First Step to Organizing Your Email -  Completely empty your email inbox

Set aside some time to respond to any important messages in your inbox that have been lingering unanswered below your viewing pane.  Then, move everything in your inbox into a new “archive” folder – this will house your read/responded emails from now on.

You now have an empty email inbox. To keep it this way, when you receive a new message – do something with it. I know this sounds too simple, but really, I’ve had an empty email inbox at the end of each day for over a week now.  Basically, with each new email that you receive, take one of the following actions:

ARCHIVE THE EMAIL MESSAGE
Most of my emails require no response or action…CC:s, FYIs and automatic notifications.  Skim through them, then immediately move them into your archive folder.

RESPOND TO THE EMAIL MESSAGE
If the email message calls for an easy answer, send it- then move the email message into your archive folder.

FORWARD THE EMAIL MESSAGE
If the message is better handled by someone else – send it off to that person, then move it to the archive folder.

HOLD THE EMAIL MESSAGE FOR LATER
This is the one exception to an immediate empty email inbox.  Some e-mail messages need longer follow ups than you have time for or you just don’t have all of the answers at that point.  You can leave this in your inbox – it actually beats the default “flagging” option which I always do but rarely follow up on.

Avoid letting too many of these email messages stay in your inbox. Set aside some time at the end of each day to respond to as many of these as possible – with the goal of an empty email inbox.

If you try this method…or a variation of it – I’d love to hear from you on your method for organizing your email.

My involvement with Wingman Media has produced some dramatic results for their clients, many who have grown from a single brick-and-mortar location to major players in their industries. Both personally and professionally, I’m having a field day given the opportunity to take these clients to the next level by integrating interactive marketing programs to complement their offline activities.

One of Wingman Media’s clients, Boston Medical Group, was quoted in a recent press release and gave a gleaming impression of the new interactive team that I assembled at Wingman Media:

“The Wingman Media interactive team helped to improve efficiencies and decrease our cost per lead over the last six months,” Chris Reis, Marketing Director for the Altamonte Springs, Fla.-based Boston Men’s Health Center, the management company for Boston Medical Group, says. “Even in this tough economic environment, they have delivered a unified strategy to our online presence that has us positioned for a great 2009.”

Aside from their bottom line, the interactive marketing team at Wingman Media focused their interactive initiatives on unifying Boston Medical Groups’ on- and offline messaging. One tactic that we executed to create this continuity is a blog, authored by Boston Medical Group’s Andrew – their spokesman and radio personality. Andrew is blogging and developing his engagement with fans and potential patients through several social media platforms, including his twitter.

More to come from my ventures as an interactive marketing consultant with Wingman Media…

Visit Goodbye Dysfunction

Over the past six months, I’ve been working as a “white label” consultant with a Los Angeles-based retail advertising agency, Wingman Media.  I’m acting as the department head, helping them to plan, recruit and build a solid interactive team to complement their other retail advertising offerings, which include radio and TV broadcast planning and buying.

So six months has passed, the Wingman Media interactive team has grown to include a/an:

• Dedicated Interactive Account Manager
• Paid Search Specialist
• Earned Media Manager
• Organic Search (SEO) Specialist
• Web Analyst

I’m in the process of filling the void of an Online Display Media Specialist as the campaigns we develop and execute become increasingly complex. Being in the retail space, Wingman Media’s clients pose some interesting challenges that I haven’t experienced before. Specifically, tracking phone calls to leads to a sale at a physical location, which I solved by employing some nifty telephony service providers and custom database fields, along with a slew of consumer touchpoint channels.

Stay tuned for more updates on my work with Wingman Media.

The article, titled “Economy Down and Google Up“, opened by pointing out Google’s recent revenue gains and moved on to a topic that is actually becoming very apparent in my own experiences lately. I’ve been working with a traditional broadcast media agency and can clearly see the shift in budgets to more performance-based interactive channels. I believe that it is a combination of multitudes of marketers finally “getting” interactive media and, as Mike’s article points out, the slowed economy which causes businesses to look for the most efficient means to reach their audience. I’m not one to complain.

Just today, I was searching for “Boston Medical Group” in Google. (Just for the record I am not a prospective patient; not that there is anything wrong with it)

Mixed in with Boston Medical Group’s own website, the results are scattered with patient question on medical forums, local directory listings and some glaring consumer complaint sites.

I think that it is perfectly ethical for the owners of these consumer complaint sites to give people a voice against bad consumer experiences. I don’t even mind that they are actively optimizing their sites for the brand names in order to look more relevant to the search engines. What bothers me is the way these sites all seem to have a business model based around extortion. Every consumer complaint site that I ran across while searching for Boston Medical Group had mostly negative, apparently user generated content. (anonymously posted, of course) At the same time, the sites offer “Reputation Management” services for companies to purchase, which, from what I can gather from their vague description, will remove your listing from the site – and hence Google’s search results page. It seems to me that the people running these sites are simply online extortionists. (and there is something wrong with that.)

In my opinion, Google and the other major search engines should be investigating consumer complaint sites that are getting massive exposure through their algorithmic results for branded terms like “Boston Medical Group”, then asking for money to have the negative publicity removed.

As I mentioned in a previous post, LA Web Ventures is a meetup group that I started in order to provide a venue for Los Angeles web entrepreneurs to network with and learn from others who have launched successful entrepreneurial ventures online.

On July 26th, our next meeting will include a discussion on how to identify and create opportunities through strategic partnerships. This discussion will include practical, real-world examples for small, medium and large businesses. The group will learn about how businesses are succeeding by leveraging their current assets in new ways through partnerships.

Jeff Rohwer will be leading this discussion. He is an interactive marketing strategist and consultant with over 10 years of experience in designing, developing and deploying strategic, technical solutions for a wide range of industries including health care and hospitality.

If you’d like to attend the next meetup, you can get more information and RSVP here.

The lack of solid scalability planning in twitters platform causes enough downtime to spawn sites, groups and even products surrounding the social utility’s iconic “Fail Whale” that is displayed when the site is inaccessible.

As I logged in tonight, I see that there is system maintenance planned for 6pm PST on July 4th. I think that even the most useless sites on the internet don’t do maintenance on major holidays. What adds insult to injury is that twitter’s main function is intended to let people know what you are up to. A lot of “twits” will be stagnant for 2 hours while they wait for twitter to come back online to find out where the best fireworks gathering is taking place.