SavvyThenew courses p2 :: savvy article p3 :: savvy girls p4 :: savvy case study p5

an adventure p6 :: marketing article p7 :: social media article p8 :: savvy tip p9

volume 1 :: july issue :: 2010

integrated effortsFree yourself from the daily grind. page 3

Launching! This is my favorite part of any marketing effort!

This is the time when all your planning and preparation finally take on a real, tangible form, whether in print or electronically on a screen.

The launch is just as important as the planning and preparation stages; in fact, maybe even more important! Act carefully during this phase, as a mis-step such as ignoring key events in your timing, a major typo in your big marketing piece, or not having one critical element of your campaign ready to go, can make all your efforts meaningless!

We’re working hard to launch a few new efforts ourselves, and can’t wait to share them with you in the coming months!

One launch that has just taken place is my full-time RV adventure! My husband Tim and I are taking our businesses on the road for a year or so. Right now we’re driving to Anacortes, WA, and then Alaska. More details in the image at the right and on page 5...Happy 4th of July!

helping you integrate social media into your marketing

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Launching an integrated marketing effort can be tricky. First there’s the research. You need to have an idea of what you want to do and how you can do it, so research is elemental to leading up to the next phase of the process: planning.

Planning requires integration of goals, objectives and marketing efforts! Planning also typically needs to take into consideration things like marketing, PR, graphic design, advertising, sponsorship, IT efforts, customer service and more.

And then there’s the execution, which must all be well timed, effectively executed and flawless. Launching all the elements of a campaign is often where folks get tripped up, so make you are truly prepared to “go.”

And of course there is evaluation of your efforts and your plan. Integration doesn’t mean squat if you don’t know if it’s working–or if there are areas that need stronger integration!

I hope you enjoy The Savvy this month and let us know on our Facebook page how your integration is going!

Tim & I are going full-time RVing for the next year or so. Tim is an online professor for several universities, and since both our businesses can be done from wherever we have our laptops, internet access, and our cell phones, we have decided to take advantage of the opportunity to make this dream of ours a reality!

So how will that affect The Collective Savvy? Not at all!

I’ll still be working just as hard to help you take your businesses to the next level! I’ll still be just as available by email or phone as always! I’ll even be back to Denver at least once a month for face-to-face meetings and photo shoots.

I’ll just be changing the view out my window more frequently, and living one of my dreams! Read more about this adventure on page 5!

We’ll be blogging about our adventure, and I’ll be out photographing more frequently...I’ll post lots of photos on our blog!

Want to follow along with this adventure? You can online at ricesradicalsabbatical.com, on Facebook at facebook.com/laptopnomads, or on Twitter at twitter.com/laptopnomads.

cover photo © Candy Rice

Courses + TrainingQuick-Hit Courses for Business Owners and Marketing Directors!

Questions? Contact us today!Candy: 303.947.5527 ■ Cassie: 720.244.3503

info@thecollectivesavvy.comOther training options:Our first webinar with Marathon Press on July 14th!This one is FREE...register today at Marathon’s website!July 14, 2010 at 11am (mountain time)6 Savvy Tricks for Getting “Liked”If you build it, they will come (or not!). Join Cassie and I as we share secrets of social media marketing for the photography industry! This class answers the question “I have a Facebook page...now what do I do?” and presents practical ways to build a base of customers that “like” your Facebook page.

Soon we will be offering affordable webinars through Marathon on a variety of social media + marketing topics, such as these:• I don’t get Twitter...how would I use it for my business?• Save time in social media! Quick and easy ways to integrate the key social

media sites (Facebook, Twitter, + LinkedIn)• 5 quick marketing strategies for Facebook• The “right” way to leverage your LinkedIn contacts for business• Understanding Facebook privacy, and more!

Customized Classes!The Collective Savvy helps you build the bridge between your business desires and completion. We offer classes and personal coaching on a variety of marketing and social media topics perfect for business owners and marketing professionals.

Just one for class? No problem! Utilize our personal coaching services. Have a group? Let us know and we’ll build you a customized class! Need us to travel to come to you? We can do that too!

Private coaching now available at an hourly rate of $200, 2-hour minimum.2

Learn a Lot in 45 Minutes!We are excited to offer 3 new 45-minute courses on social media and marketing! The classes are held at the Community College of Denver’s Auraria Campus.

• Affordable parking…only $3.50!• Easy to find…right in the Admin Building!• Limit of 30 students per class…small enough to be personal and large

enough to be anonymous if you want.• Choose the morning, lunch, or afternoon session…or any combination!

Thursday, July 15thChoose from 3 exciting courses, each only 45 minutes long and packed with practical, useful information, plus a Q+A session at the end!

8 Savvy Tips to Get Your Business on Twitter ($79)9:00-9:45amTweet the day away–and do it all on company time! This class walks you through how to get your company on Twitter and key ways to leverage Twitter for your business!

10 Savvy Secrets to Customize your Company’s Facebook Page ($79)11:30am-12:15pmInstantly optimize your Facebook page with the savvy secrets revealed in this class. Learn the secrets of how to get people to move beyond liking your page and engage them to take action!

15 Savvy Tricks for Getting “Liked” on Facebook ($79)2:00-2:45pmIf you build it, they will come (or not!). This class answers the question “I have a Facebook page...now what do I do?” and presents practical ways to build a base of customers that “like” your Facebook page.

Savvy Ways to Separate Yourself from the Daily Grind When you begin integrating your marketing efforts, being savvy is the way to go! There are many, many ways to integrate, but launching your integration correctly is vital to the success of your marketing efforts. Your launch sets the tone for your campaign and can affect whether your campaign is a boom or a bust.

Here are five ways that savvy marketers ensure a properly integrated launch:1. Make sure your logo or wordmark is

on everything you produce in print or virtually, so that people can easily identify your materials as yours. You want them to associate everything you produce with you and/or your company, so utilize your logo!

2. Determine the “look and feel” you want for your marketing and stick with it. This applies to colors, images, fonts, volume of text, and more! Make sure that carries over into everything you do, including your social media, radio messaging or brochures. The effort you put in here will allow brand reinforcement with your key stakeholders.

3. Ensure your tone and messaging reflects your internal integration. If your brand focuses on vehicle safety and customer service is a key part of that, your messaging and tone are essential to bringing that to the forefront. If you carry high-end products and want to provide customers with high-end service, address that as well. Everything you do or say affects how people perceive your brand, so make sure that integration carries over into your campaign launch!

4. Do self cross-promotion. List your website, Twitter, and other related accounts on your Facebook page. In your print material, list your webpage and social media sites. In your advertising, mention how people can get more information. Make sure everything you produce lets folks opt into receiving information from you. Just because someone found your website doesn’t mean that’s how they want to communicate with you.

5. When you can, integrate your social media. Make your blog post to your Facebook page, your page post to your Twitter account, your Twitter account post on your LinkedIn, etc. This will save you time and energy, and reinforce your messages to people through their site of choice.

Not sure what else to do? Check out large, popular brands that do marketing well and think about what they are doing and how they are doing it. Brands such as McDonald’s, Starbucks, Macy’s and Coach all exhibit great integration techniques! Don’t worry so much about their budget, but pay attention to how all of their marketing effectively ties together. And apply it to your own business! Or contact Candy and I...we can help you launch your social media so it pops!

The main thing we would like to emphasize about launching an integrated marketing effort is that research, planning, and timely launching of various marketing channels are crucial for your success. Give yourself plenty of time to launch to make sure all of your bases are covered.

Need some help launching? Contact The Collective Savvy at info@thecollectivesavvy.com. We love helping businesses reach their goals–and we’d love to help you achieve yours! Check us out on Facebook, Twitter, and our website and contact us when you’re ready to plan and implement.

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integrated effortsFree yourself from the daily grind.

by Cassie Bair

make your social media explode. insert some savvy.

It’s funny what people say when I tell them, “I’m going full-time RVing for a year!”

In response I’ve heard, “Wow! That’s cool...wish I could do that!” and “Really? Where are you headed first?” and “I wish I could afford to take a year off and do that!”

When I explain that I’m not taking a year off, but rather that I’m working full-time to develop and manage a growing business, but choosing to live in an RV in various parts of the country while doing so...most people aren’t quite sure what to say next.

What I’ve learned from this is that there is a big difference between what most people think about full-time RVing for a year (luxury, year-long vacation, retirement, etc.)...and what I’m doing!

My personal philosophy has always been to do the things now that most people wait until they’re retired to do. And that has taken me across our beautiful planet, through many spontaneous adventures with my husband Tim and our yellow lab Chase. But this is a little different!

The DreamOne huge dream we have had for the past year or so (and have worked hard to be in

a position to act on when the opportunity arose) is to take our businesses mobile, and live and work wherever we want to. This dream has just come true! My husband and I are both finally self-employed and able to spend some time living as laptop nomads in various parts of the country thoughout the year, working to live wherever we have our laptops, cell phones, and a connection to the internet.

Tim is an online professor for 3 schools (presently...his business is growing steadily) and of course you know what mine is!

The RealityI am living and working full-time in our Trailmanor RV for the next year, at least. We left Denver on June 28th and as I write this we are nearly to Anacortes, Washington, our home for most of July!

I’m working just as hard today to continue developing The Collective Savvy as I did when we lived full-time in Denver...the only difference is that now I can change the view outside my office whenever I want to! Oh, and a few meetings will be moved from in-person to Skype or GoToMeeting.

My work hours will be fairly similar, but I’ll have the opportunity to spend more time with my husband and explore more of the world in our hours away from our businesses.

How TCS is Affected (or Not!)While I’m not naive enough to believe that

this radical sabbatical can be accomplished without some adjustments within Cassie’s and my business, the fact is that we planned from the beginning for much of The Collective Savvy to be done from any location in which either Cassie or I can have our laptops, a high-speed internet connection, and a cell phone.

Since Cassie is choosing for now to remain in Denver, most of the face time our clients require can be managed by her, supplemented by me during the 1 week or so of each month that I’ll be back in town.

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Savvy Case StudyRices’ Radical Sabbatical, The USA + CanadaHow TCS partner Candy Rice is living the full-time RV dream while building a business

photos © Sohi Photography. www.sohiphotography.com

Where a Proper Launch Will Take You!Most of you probably don’t know how The Collective Savvy came to be. I had the pleasure of working with Candy’s husband Tim for a year prior to meeting Candy. During that time, Tim told me repeatedly he wanted to have me get together with his wife–he “just had a feeling something good would come of it.”

So months after I left that organization, Tim finally set Candy and I up for coffee. And I went from being a past co-worker of Tim’s to a partner of Candy’s! This month, co-owner of The Collective Savvy and my business partner of choice is taking off to the wild-blue yonder…or perhaps I should say is letting the rubber meet the road in her exciting RV adventure!

You may be wondering how the Rices’ Radical Sabbatical is related to The Collective Savvy? The fact is, it all ties together. Because as long as I’ve known Tim, he has talked about wanting to take the show on the road and RV across the U.S. So when Candy and I put together our business plan for The Collective

Savvy, we put an RV contingency in. Fortunately for us, we knew to plan for their grand adventure in advance. That’s allowed us to structure a very fluid (and on many levels, virtual) marketing and social media integration business.

While the Rices are on the road, I’ll be staying on the ground here in Denver and will cover a lot of the phone calls, emails, and in-person meetings. Candy will be back in town at least once a month for several days, and will share in the classes and face-to-face meetings, plus manage a lot of the graphic design, planning, and some back-end stuff in order to give her the flexibility to be on the road. We’ll continue to mutually share in the workload for our clients. And Tim? We’ll, he seems to be a natural sales person for our business, so I have a feeling he’ll be pitching our services more often than he realizes.

The nice thing is that the Rice’s Radical Sabbatical will have them driving the RV back to Colorado often, so there will still be plenty of face-to-face time. And of course, business will go on as usual–just with a better story to tell! After all, we launched our business with this plan in place.

by Cassie

Since many of our clients live in other parts of the country anyway, this change really affects our business in very minor ways, other than our internal business processes. Here are a few things we have had candid conversations about:• How will we handle client meetings in

Denver?• How will we coordinate our work

schedules while Candy is driving between locations?

• How much will Cassie have to handle–will the workload become unbalanced between the two partners?

• What is the exit strategy if it doesn’t work well?

• How can we ensure continued great service to our clients?

• How soon can Cassie and Chris join us on the road? :)

Want to Follow Along on Our Adventure?We would LOVE to have you follow along on our adventure. We are blogging pretty much daily about our work, life, and experiences at ricesradicalsabbatical.com. Or if Facebook is your preferred channel, please “like” our page at facebook.com/laptopnomads. And finally, if Twitter is more your speed, feel free to follow along there at twitter.com/laptopnomads.

by Candy 6

Featured Offer

“Design i s not making beauty, beauty emerges from selection,

affi nities, i ntegration,

love.”-Louis Kahn

“We sometimes feel that what we do is just a drop in the ocean, but the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.”

-Mother Teresa

The Importance of Implementing an Integrated Marketing Plan for your Small BusinessExcerpt of an article by Jason Martinezat www.buzzle.com

The progression of marketing–moving beyond traditional to include interactive, consumer driven, social marketing has spread like Ebola. It’s often referred to as Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC). IMC is ushering in a new era in which marketers blend communication messages across all available media channels into a continuous brand experience. As part of a successful integrated marketing strategy, IMC integrates public relations, advertising, online, social media, etc., and other communications elements into one cohesive entity all sharing the same message.

Many organizations today are now embracing this concept of IMC. Instead of dividing marketing communications into separate groups that rarely communicate; organizations are now integrating all marketing disciplines

under one umbrella; thus, making every communication consistent with one message, sharing the same strategy. This also allows marketers to execute marketing campaigns more efficiently without having to jump through hoops to get approvals for creative, content, messaging, etc.

The key to effective integration is the cohesiveness between various marketing messages, and the understanding that marketing is fundamentally a conversation between a company and its prospective customer. It is not one specific marketing campaign or press release; rather, how the blending and execution of such disciplines convey a message synergistically, and at every possible customer touch point.

IMC includes the various tools such as advertising, public relations, personal selling, sales promotion, direct & database marketing, sponsorship, event marketing, social media marketing, and online marketing (search, banner advertising, affiliate, etc.). Since the purpose of marketing is to generate revenue, increase market share, drive preference to purchase, and/or build brand awareness, marketers need to find ways to do this effectively; and embracing an integrated marketing strategy is the first step.

Integrated Marketing At Work

Nike is a great example of a company that has fully embraced...rest of the article 7

Marketing Article

“No One can put a limit on you without your permission.”

-John L. Mason

Integrate Social Media with your other Marketing Activities. Preaching to the Choir?Excerpt of an article by Winnie Ngat www.createyournextcustomer.techweb.com

Gosh, I truly hope so.

Social media alone is just that–alone. If you’re not integrating it with your other marketing tactics, its [sic] opportunity lost. Our latest research study, Social Media at Work, reveals social networking sites now account for 13% of the total time IT decision makers spend consuming media for work purposes.

That’s a significant increase from our last study just two years ago. That said, integrating social media with your online, event and print marketing mix is an example of where 1+1+1= 5. That’s why so many marketers are now starting to do it. You can get started right away with some simple moves:• Incorporate links in your posts with

relevant content from your websites to drive additional engagement with your brand.

• Add social and share icons to your newsletters, email campaigns, and even your print ads and direct mail campaigns to grow and cultivate your network.

• Highlight key points from your corporate blogs in your presentations and other collateral materials.

• Share attendee’s and your own tweets during face to face or web based events.

• Integrate, integrate, integrate. Beyond just optimizing your company’s presence, there’s [sic] incremental benefits in doing so: you can begin to identify and track “followers” as they move from your social media networks to the nirvana point of when they share information and become a qualified lead for your sales team.

My colleague, Scott Vaughan, offers more advice to tech marketers when it comes to social media marketing via our new video presentation. Check it out and let us know what you think. Oh…and if we’re preaching to the choir, that’s a good thing. It means all us marketers have this social media thing under control...right?

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Social Media Article

“A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.”

-Proverb

Looking for ways to streamline

(and potentially integrate)

your efforts? Save time,energy

and resources by using some

of the resources below. Check

out some of the following sites

to make your marketing and

business work a little easier!

Google Apps for Small Business

This is the official Google site

listing all of your app options

and includes Gmail for business,

calendar options, groups and

documents.

Facebook Applications

This site lists all Facebook

applications. And to make it

easy for you, it lists categories

such as business, education,

entertainment and more!

Phone Applications

Need to know what is out

there for your iPhone, Droid,

Blackberry, etc.? Check out this

site to see what is available.

Google Chrome Extension

If you use Google Chrome, you

should consider using a variety

of Chrome extensions that will

make your life easier!

Twitter Applications

With over 1,700 Twitter

applications and books, Twitdom

has a little something for all

Twitter users.

Savvy Tip

Learn more about us online!www.thecollectivesavvy.com

Candy: 303.947.5527Cassie: 720.244.3503

info@thecollectivesavvy.com

facebook.com/collectivesavvytwitter.com/collectivesavvy

linkedin.com/companies/collective-savvy

facebook.com/thesavvygirlstwitter.com/thesavvygirls

How can we help you?• Marketing + Social Media Strategy• Marketing + Social Media Management• Marketing + Social Media Newsletter• Design + Photography + Copy Writing• Marketing + Social Media Training9

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