While MCCI has felt the economic pinch over the last year, much like just about everyone else… we’ve been fortunate to recently rekindle old client relationships while bringing in several new faces as well.

Prior to the summer of this year General Motors had been a long time key client… but as they emerge as a leaner and stronger player in automotive landscape, we’re happy to be working with their communications team on a number of new story-telling initiatives. Additionally, we’ll be doing some video work for Bosco’s Pizza, some media/public relations for SEMHA related to the H1N1 vaccine and will be working with Digerati Solutions on a number of marketing strategies.

In the spring of 2009, MCCI started working with EcoCAR (through the US Department of Energy and the National Argonne Laboratory) to provide high energy video podcasts and event management services at the “EcoCAR: The Next Challenge” event in Toronto.  Over the course of four days our team produced, shot and published a series of 3 daily event video podcasts,  a final awards ceremony video and produced the ceremony itself.

More recently, at the fall workshop in Boston, EcoCAR relied on our production expertise to produce and record a series of training seminars through video, audio and PowerPoint integration as well as two video podcast profiles.

Here’s a couple of video samples:
The EcoCAR Challenge event day 3: “Behind the Scenes”

A profile of program sponsor A123 – who donated several battery cells to the student teams

For more about:
The EcoCAR Challenge
Argonne National Laboratory

We’ve been focusing a significant amount of  energy over the past couple of years in developing national business clients.   While maintaining local strength in our own Michigan backyard is important,  a business priority is and has been out of state growth.  In addition to such national/international clients such as Avon Products, Baxter Pharmaceuticals, NAPA Rayloc & Ascension Health, MCCI is pleased to announce a new business relationship with Storeroom Solutions  (Philadelphia, PA).

We’ll be working on a series of communications needs for Storeroom – key message development, public relations/marketing strategies and web development.

Here’s why “unfiltered” media matters today: there are dozens and dozens of reporters, editors, online publications, editorialists, et al in so-called traditional media. They all own their media properties and screen their content. They sell ad space, online and in print and broadcast. They each have their own style guides. They all filter content from contributors so it aligns with their sense of their publications, their attitudes and their sense of responsibility to manage and control the content they place in their publications.

That’s all well and good.

The problem is that today everyone is a publisher. Individuals – hundreds of millions of them world-wide – are accustomed to generating their own content and gaining audiences for that content, even if they’re microscopic audiences. There’s no filtering. There’s no creative limitation. There’s no editorial policy. Just straight, unfiltered content in text, video, audio and photo imagery.

Increasingly, corporations and institutions have discovered the same thing about unfiltered content – and it’s hard for them to adjust in particular because they’ve been used to extreme filtering of their content to the outside world. This new revolution is forcing corporations and businesses, large and small, to rediscover authenticity in what they say and how they generally communicate to the outside world.

Why? Because web audience demand it. The lack of transparency and authenticity by businesses in the publishing world is perceived and detected to be phony and wooden by extremely sophisticated consumer and B to B audiences.

That’s where the action is. Authenticity. Unfiltered content. That’s why most media properties are struggling today, because they’ve always been all about control. As for the business community, those who adjust their culture to fit the new reality will do well.

Those who can’t find their way to transparency will simply shrivel and die.

After the successful development of an internal communications e-newsletter for Avon associates in Latin America, positive feedback has traveled quickly in the Latin American business community of  South Florida.

Baxter, a global pharmaceutical company, has asked us to develop a similar quarterly product for their own employees throughout Central and South America.  We’ve got thirty days to develop a graphically intense product, laden with “rich-media”, and translated from English into Spanish and Portuguese, but it’s just the sort of challenge that MCCI is always ready to take on.

Over the past several months, MCCI has been working with Dr. Sharon Ostalecki to develop a broadcast special highlighting Fibromyalgia – quickly described as unexplained chronic pain.   Originally produced last year as a broad scope 90 minute documentary, PBS in Detroit (WTVS) agreed to air a 30 minute version on public television.

The special aired on September 15, 16 & 20, 2009 and has been viewed by 30,000+ households so far.  More importantly, MCCI is proud to play a small role in helping to spread awareness of this largely unknown and misunderstood affliction.

Here’s the trailer…

To learn more about Fibromyalgia, please visit HFFCF.org.

In today’s cluttered e-world, an integrated strategy is always the best policy.

First, focus on communication vehicles that those of qualified interest need take action to reach. These are called “pull” products. Someone has to think about going to you, in order to get there. The best example is your web site.

An excellent, but current and topical web site comes first. This is where most companies fail. They create online brochures which are static and generally not changed. A low word count comes second because too much text is a turnoff. A fair amount of topical video and audio is also essential. And of course, daily or at least weekly content updating is mandatory. If you’re not continually creating and reflecting new short content, users have no reason to visit your site a second time. (Since most of our busy clients don’t have time to do that, we generate and post that content in partnership with many clients.)

But you also need to focus on “push” communications, where you actually send your content to the targeted population. The old world did that through direct mail, mailed brochures, drop-off of collateral material at meetings, etc.

But today you can’t really have a holistic, “push” strategy without social media – where subscribers actually want to hear what you have to say and be updated on what you’re doing – through blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and through direct, content-oriented e-newsletters (again, with short video and audio pods wherever possible).

This also requires prolific content updating – but if you integrate your new content to both “push” and “pull” online communications, web search engines will intuitively sense that key phrases in your online content are seen in multiple web locations – on your web, through social media, and through e-news content. That, in turn will move you and your company’s content into higher position on search engines.

And that’s exactly what you want to have happen, to keep your expertise visible, and not lost in the sea of internet communications.

Did you know that about 75% of those who have blog sites don’t actually blog for many months at a time? They also don’t typically push that content into other media as well. Bloggers would blog regularly. Period. I’ve fallen into the trap of not putting the right priority personally on my blog/tweet/Facebook activity. Big mistake! You must be prolific in presentation of your ideas. You also need to cross-pollinate your content in as many places and in as many ways as possible.

Take a short video podcast, for example. You put the podcast on your web site. But you should also put it on your blog, link it on Facebook, create a link in your Twitter Tweets, and post it on multiple video portals like YouTube with unique searchable key words. Then you should take “out-takes” from any podcast interviews you conducted, and also transcribe that content and convert it into text blogs as well – and maybe push a version of it to Facebook, while creating multiple Tweets derived from that raw content.

This kind of activity involves creating the core content only once – but cross-pollinating it in multiple ways. Search engines then intuitively detect the multiple locations of that relatively similar content (especially with similar strings of words or short phrases) and then bring your content higher on search engine lists for those who are interested in similar kinds of information. That, in turn, creates higher visibility for your ideas!

I was meeting today with the Sr. VP of Marketing/Communications for a $200M finance firm on the east coast. Like so many others, he just got the order a couple of weeks ago: his body count must go down. He was forced to drop his director of communications and some others. Now the executive has lots of demands, but not enough “go to” people to make it all happen. He’s swamped as it is and maybe even sleepless: the circles under his eyes were so deep I couldn’t even see the color of his eyes or the whites surrounding them.

Though losing a key member of his team was depressing for him and tragic for the guys who lost their jobs, there are some things firms like mine do to lessen the fallout for the executive. In a virtual world, with the help of transparent, user friendly technology, I showed the exec why he doesn’t have to sacrifice his marketing agenda just because his budget is contracting – and he can start getting 7 or 8 hours of sleep a night. Here are my five favorite tips for marketing execs who want to cut budgets and save money:

1) Use a contractor – but be careful about subcontracting services to large  ad agencies: they tend to load up too many bodies on very simple jobs, and their profit margins are often grossly excessive.

2) Use a contractor who is totally transparent in all billing practices – and one who is willing to quote flat costs for specific product development services (brochures, e-newsletters, web design, content development, PR, etc.) upfront while quoting a flat, non-changeable fee.

3) If hourly rate services are required, demand a front-end estimate as to the number of hours for specific activity; if its impossible to estimate, look for a rate of $100/hour, give or take 10 dollars or so.

4) Look for an occasional in-person relationship with the leader of that contractor organization – otherwise, avoid lots of on-site meetings when a phone or video conference will do. A solid organization should be able to give you terrific results with no in-person meetings. (Many marketing organizations love on-site meetings because they can send several people and rack up the hourly bills.)

5) Finally: avoid organizations owned by large conglomerates – their margins are ridiculous (funded by you). Look for a boutique firm that will give you tons of attention at reasonable prices – but beware of boutique names that are actually subsidiaries of large multi-national agencies – they look small, but their cost structures are no different than their parent companies.