A newsletter managed by 200+ writers

by Richard Walters

How does a Fortune 200 company get to be that big? Often times, acquisitions are involved. And, as it pertains to our real life example, multiple locations, methods, vehicles and best practices are all thrown together in the process, too.

There was a sincere attempt at combining the best practices of the multiple teams, but a lot of time was typically spent routing, formatting and distributing content (rather than creating it). This is where  Mindspace stepped in to help. Our Interactive team was asked to assist one of the business units in creating simple to use, flexible and extensible communication tools that were to be used by the company’s MarCom team members for channel communication.

Our solution included several components. First, we started with the push vehicle—a website. The website met the company’s current branding standards, was built to be updatable any time and required minimal to no training to edit. The control of the content was given to the content owners, and different levels of access were created to accommodate a content owner hierarchy (some were allowed to post, others allowed to approve and others were able to create new sections or edit user access). The writers were also introduced to site visitors, which added a personal touch to the website’s communication style. Additionally, the company’s 10,000+ subscribers received a newsletter that had overlapping relevant content with the website.

Upon launch, a special outreach campaign was used with direct mail components and prizes to promote these new tools. Participation climbed continuously over the two years it was in operation, and the client confirmed that the new site was easier to use and less work to maintain than their previous disparate combination of solutions. The new website was also significantly more consistent with the company’s branding efforts.

In order to measure effectiveness, metrics were also built in that allowed each department to see how often their articles were read.

After two years, the Mindspace team was asked to take the tools to Phase II and extend it to four other business units within the same company. This has since been accomplished with a similar minimal learning curve and customer response. A few new features were added, like tracking per article, password protected documents, image inclusion, two-way automated Twitter feeds, “green” flagging, multi-national support and more.

Our solution, dubbed “Advantage,” is now being used by over 200 content editors across six business units. It continues to be a successful channel marketing tool that allows for a large disparate team to communicate in a concise, consistent manner. By putting the control in the hands of the content owners, not a web team, communication time was significantly reduced and the MarCom team was able to spend their time communicating their marketing efforts instead of managing logistics.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 at 12:36 pm and is filed under Interactive, new media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.