Why is it important to be on several different social media avenues? We find a lot of our clients are asking us more and more, which social media outlet is right for them. Why choose?

All of your social media sites can be linked together, for example if post something on Twitter it can stream right to your LinkedIn or Facebook page. There are several different applications for your computer or smartphone that streams all of your friend’s tweets, posts and updates all together on one screen so you aren’t clicking back and forth from one site to the other.

It can only be beneficial for you to be on as many sites as possible. From a marketing standpoint, your followers may be on different social media avenues and you want to reach them all!

Over the last couple months we have been working on an exciting project for Total MRO involving, among other things, integrating an e-commerce solution with their internal Sage MAS-90 system. Sage MAS-90 is a fully featured Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system that does everything from warehouse inventory management, to invoicing and accounting, to order credit card processing. This project entailed redesigning and rebuilding their website to be in line with modern web standards and practices, architecting an e-commerce solution that could work with their Sage MAS-90 system, and adding a feature set to the website that was currently unavailable through their traditional sales channels. The benefit of the project would be seen across the board as they will be able to increase sales by avoiding internal bottlenecks. This streamlining will mean more revenue without having to scale other areas of their infrastructure.

Total MRO looked to us to orchestrate this project; we worked with Acom Healthcare, Shields Design Studio and ROI Consulting of Omaha, Nebraska. Acom and Shields produced a great, clean, highly usable design and photography which conveys the professionalism that they were lacking in their previous website. ROI Consulting supplied us with the INSYNCH module which allows connections between SQL and the Sage system, using this module we were able to directly integrate our system with their internal systems and their real-time data.

Having the web interface for ordering allows them to do many things they were previously unable to do. We designed a solution to provide recommended products based on what other people have ordered, created areas for TotalMRO to feature select products, and built an easy to use product reordering system for their customers. In addition to these new features, the customers that had custom pricing based on their order volumes have these prices reflected on the site when they log in using their preexisting customer number.

These features reflect a small subset of what our development team is capable of. We worked with Total MRO to discover what would work best for them, most enhance the user experience, and help boost sales. As we near launch all parties are pleased with where we are and the potential that the new site holds for their company. This has been a very interesting project for us, and has been a great opportunity to help another business discover and enhance internal efficiencies

We would like to introduce the newest member to the BCG team. Her name is Amanda Fulling and she is heading up the newest service that Brattle is now offering, Social Media Marketing. Amanda comes to us with five years of experience in the marketing field with significant experience generating successful Social Media campaigns.

What is Social Media Marketing?

• Social Media Marketing is the use of social networks, online communities, blogs or any other online collaborative media for marketing, sales, public relations and customer service. Common social media marketing tools include Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Foursquare and YouTube.

Ways we can use Social Media:

• Track, monitor and interact with customer feedback/questions in real-time
• Create hype around upcoming events, promotions, specials etc.
• Increase traffic to your company website or blog
• Create a larger customer base by using viral marketing techniques

Services:
• Social PR

• Includes the management of all your Social Media sites and services. You focus on your business, we’ll do the rest.

• Social Promotions

• Generate buzz around upcoming events; before, during and after

• Social Text Messaging

• Create, manage and transmit Text Messages to target-specific types of current and potential customers

Our team is well versed in Facebook, Blogging, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare and other social media channels. If you need assistance or have questions about Social Media, please give us a call 617-229-7210.

We are excited to announce the opening of our Manchester, NH office. While we are still keeping the Boston office, recent expansion has enabled us to open another office in Manchester, NH. This space will serve as our “home base” moving forward and provides us plenty of space to continue to grow. We are now located on the Third Floor of the Carpenter Building on Elm Street in downtown Manchester. We are doing some fun things in the space and encourage all of our friends and clients to come check out the new place. Some of our more interesting rooms include the “think tank”, the “living room”, and the “turret”. We are aiming to keep the space very comfortable and make it a space that is pleasant to be in, while keeping it functional and maintaining a professional feeling. We will be hosting an open house in the near future as soon as we finish getting settled in.

Attention fellow blog followers FB is at it again…:As of Thursday, April 22nd, there is a new privacy setting called “Instant Personalization” that shares data with non-facebook websites and it is automatically set to “Allow.” Go to Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites and uncheck “Allow”–it’s at the bottom of the page.

If you don’t mind your personal information being shared there are three launch sites Facebook has partnered with they are; Pandora, Microsoft’s Docs.com and Yelp. So for instance if you were to log onto Pandora for the first time, it would use all your public information on Facebook to give you a personalized experienced so if you stated that you like Dave Matthews Band through a personal interest page the first song that will come up on Pandora will be a DMB song.

This could be something super cool or creepy depending on how private you are, but if you are set to private on Facebook you don’t have anything to worry about when it comes to data sharing anyways.

If you haven’t heard of the newest social media craze you have to check it out! Foursquare is a cross between a friend-finder, social city-guide and a game that rewards you for doing interesting things.

The way it works is you “check-in” to the location you are, whether it is a bar, park, town/city or even the Leaning Tower of Pisa! How does Foursquare know where you are? It uses the GPS on your Smartphone such as iPhone, Blackberry or Android, when you log on it shows you all the places around your current location or you can search for the location you are at if it doesn’t show up on the list.

The benefits from this are endless, you could go anywhere in your city or an unfamiliar place and check out all the places that show up when you log into Foursquare. I bet you will go to places you have never been to before! You can then see who is at the same location you are at and make new friends!

Coming next how to score awesome badges and what’s all this talk about becoming Mayor??

Thank you Sweet Cierra’s we think you Rock!

Brattle is introducing a new service to our web clients, “Reference Processing”. The service works a little bit like artificial intelligence for your search results. Helping people quickly and seamlessly get directly to the information they are looking for. This service, used in conjunction with our analytics solutions will be able to dramatically reduce your bounce rate on certain searches, while not disturbing the users who are finding what they are really looking for.

Every time a user interacts with your website in any way, that activity, and all of its details are recorded. We are then able to analyze this data with you to decide what people are looking for, what people are finding, and how we can make those two things the same.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is half art and half science, and even if orchestrated perfectly may leave a gap between what people want and what they find. For example, if someone is searching for a specific product, they may be directed to a page higher in your site hierarchy than they need or want to see. Instead of navigating to the correct page on your site, they are likely to leave and return to their search results to find another provider.

It could require a substantial reorganizational effort within your site to get these results to organically direct you to the appropriate pages. And these changes may adversely affect how you rank for other queries.

Our Reference Processor can be configured to take these queries with high bounce rates and redirect the users to the pages most appropriate for them. Effectively, now when someone uses a search engine to find your site, the reference processer will double-check that they get where they are trying to go. Search engines algorithms and indexing services are incredible, but they are no match for your own personal knowledge of your site and your users’ trends and habits.

The system is available to the public on a per-site or per-page basis. And will not require any modifications to your existing site structure or logic. If you would like more information, or to speak with someone about how this can help your site please call (617-229-7210) or e-mail (info@brattlecg.com) Brattle.