The article, which is a great read, focused on non-profits. However, the challenges they face are quite similar to those of businesses both large and small.

Does this sound familiar to you at all? —- “…databases can be cumbersome, and accessing constituent information in real time isn’t something many organizations can do, Regen adds, noting that many nonprofits also aren’t organized for integrated marketing, with their structures, cultures and communications inhibiting cohesion“.

While some of those challenges may seem daunting to overcome, an integrated marketing approach can absolutely help. Here are 3 of the main benefits listed in the article that come from integrating marketing activities:

• Access Data in Real-Time
• Wisely Invest Your Money & Resources
• Produce a Higher ROI

Do those types of benefits sound familiar? Are they, perhaps, on your wish-list?

If so, an article like the one in DMNews may be just the inspiration you need to start integrating your marketing activities — from direct mail to e-mail to SMS to QR Codes and more.

On March 11, 2010, Mobile Commerce Daily featured an article on QR Codes from interlinkONE’s President/CEO John Foley, Jr.

The article was entitled “Tips for using QR codes in Marketing”. In the article, John provides a few basic strategies for companies that are looking to push the usage of QR Codes forward.

Here is a link to the full article: http://www.mobilecommercedaily.com/tips-for-using-qr-codes-in-marketing/

The core to Social Media for me is this: Trust is earned, and relationships are built over time. So in this sphere of marketing I try and use the tools to gain trust and build a relationship. I try my hardest to put information out there to help others grow their business.

I’m a marketer and  a business fanatic. I greatly enjoy the prospect and opportunity of helping others as well.

I’m posting and sharing information that is not always about me or my company, (99% not) but rather information that may be relevant to people that matter. Even the 1% or so is about sharing information that I still think is relevant even though another employee wrote it on behalf of the company. I’m hoping the information I share exposes my knowledge, and also our employees knowledge which can be picked up over time. If folks want to learn more about my company so be it. But they do know firsthand my thoughts on the subject matter, who is behind the company, what our employees do, the inner workings of who we are, and yes, interested folks can go find out what we do.

So it is myself and these folks… The employees in our company are empowered to use Social Media. NO policies either! This is not a leap of faith, this is part of today’s business. Iit is not discretionary in my mind. The funny part is we have been doing this all along in other marketing channels and using different medias. Yes before these tools came along, it was never sell – sell – sell for us. The difference is this environment allows us to possibly build more relationships in a broader and more meaningful way.

So — use social media to build relationships trust. And as @chrisbrogan put it, “Stop talking about yourself!”

Have a great, productive day folks!

If you wish – follow me on twitter

http://www.twitter.com/johnfoleyjr or @johnfoleyjr

John Foley Jr., President and CEO of interlinkONE, will be speaking on the subject of  “How to Use Social Media to Build Your Business.”

Also, Jason Pinto of interlinkONE will be on the panel for the subject of “QR Codes: Augmented Reality and other Mobile Marketing Opportunities”

The  forum is being held at PINE Headquarters in Southborough, MA

Here is an overview of what John will be discussing:

LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook- these sites are growing in popularity in all vertical markets and are being leveraged to promote printing and marketing services. In this session John presents advice on how to use these social media sites to grow your print and marketing services provider business. He presents real-world scenarios and shares the pros and cons of each of these popular sites.

For more information about the PINE Digital Forum, you can visit their website at http://www.pine.org/Education/digital_forum.html

Everyone can create QR Codes for free… However, only registered users have access to the real-time reporting dashboards.

Here is a quick video that walks through the features available to registered users:

Click To Zoom

Landing Pages

You might already be familiar with our Landing Page WYSIWYG Editor, but maybe you need finer control over the way your Landing Page looks.

(Or maybe you just like to get your hands dirty. It’s true, I’m one of those guys.)

In this release, we’ve given some love to the raw HTML editor by enabling:

• Line Numbers
• Syntax Highlighting
• Horizontal Scrolling

Click To Zoom

Email Templates

You’ve always had full control over the look and feel of your Email Templates,  but until now you would have to download the template, edit the code, and reupload the file.

We’ve simplified this process by providing a new “Edit Template” link. This pops up the full rich text editor, allowing you to:

• Edit text sizes, colors, fonts
• Embed images
• Add tables
• and many other functions!
• (View the full editor here)

Note: If you frequently copy-and-paste from Word, Internet Explorer, or other Microsoft products, you’ll want to look for our Paste From Word icon  (it’ll help keep your email looking great!)

We hope you like what you see; feel free to let us know what you think in the comments below!

We hope that you will be able to take some time to join us. We truly believe these sessions will help you to take advantage of the new enhancements in our product.

If you can’t make it to one of the sessions, we will be recording the webinars and posting links to them in the Marketing Resource Center. (Please note: The Marketing Resource Center is available to interlinkONE customers only.)

Below is the schedule for our March 2010 webinars. If you are an interlinkONE customer, please click on a specific event to register:

• Marketing
  Wednesday, March 10th, 2PM-3PM ESTWe will cover enhancements for building landing pages, emails, and more.
• CRM/ Sales
  Wednesday, March 17th, 2PM-3PM ESTWe will present new features within our Contact Management solutions.
• Orders & Warehouse Management
  Wednesday, March 24th, 2PM-3PM EST We will walk through some of the new reports and online ordering options.

The two students initially spent some time with Karen Sheehey, Vice President of Sales. They then took a glimpse at what Ginny Ciampa does in Human Resources. They spent the rest of the afternoon with Jason Pinto and myself learning all about interlinkONE’s Marketing Department.

It was wonderful to have the two students with us for the day.

Recently in the mail we received a letter from one of the students. It absolutely brought a smile to our faces.

The letter said the following:

To the Wonderful Staff at interlinkONE:

Thank you so much for taking time out of your schedules to talk to me. When I signed up to job shadow I had no idea about what to expect, but you made it one of the most memorable experiences of High School. I appreciate the way you made all of the information relevant to me as a high school student, and how you were willing to answer any questions. Thank you also for making everything relaxed, yet engaging at the same time. Though I spent less than five hours at interlinkONE, I feel like I really learned a lot about the way a business works, and about interactions within the workplace and within society. Thank you once again for all of your time and effort.

Sincerely,

Meghan Ryan

Thank you again to Wilmington High School for allowing our company be a part of this program.

Sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc., are helping people to find and communicate with prospects. They help people promote events. They help people “listen” to what is going on in their industry.

Social media sites can also help companies with customer service initiatives.

At interlinkONE, we have recently launched a special Twitter profile that is devoted to providing customer service. The account is http://Twitter.com/ilinkService.

The account will primarily be used to provide quick tips and tricks to help people get the most out of our marketing software.

For example, here are a few of our recent tweets:

Recent Tweets from ilinkService

We truly hope that by posting tips on Twitter, you’ll be able to find help when you need it. But we also hope that these tweets expose you to capabilities in our system that you may not have been aware of previously.

Of course, we still provide customer support through the phone, email, our ilinkProjects tool, videos, our Marketing Resource Center, webinars,  and other methods.

Twitter.com/ilinkService is just one more channel to help.

At Dscoop, we made it our mission to ensure that everyone there would be exposed to a QR Code.

Here are a few ways that QR Codes made their presence known at Dscoop 5:

Show Entrance

• As people walked into the convention center, there was a Floor Decal with a huge QR Code. If someone scanned the QR Code, they were directed to a video that gave them reasons to come to the interlinkONE booth. We have a little video of the decal here.

QR Code Floor Decal

Brochures

• We created an updated interlinkONE “Company & Product Overview” brochure. On nearly each page, people were presented with a unique QR Code. Some of the codes directed people to specific pages on our website; others went to videos.

  For example, scanning the QR Code on the Software page in our booklet directed people to more information about our products on interlinkONE.com. If they scanned the QR Code on the page that talks about our online storefronts, people were directed to a YouTube video that actually demonstrates what our storefronts actually look and feel like to use.

Cookies

While the Dscoop staff certainly ensured that there was plenty of food available for the conference attendees, people could pick up free dessert at the interlinkONE booth. Yes, that’s right —- we had QR Code cookies.  Here is a picture of the QR Code cookie:

QR Code Cookies

Here is a picture of our good friend Jim Olsen, from Great Reach Communications, helping to spread the word about QR Codes.

Clothing

• At the closing reception of Dscoop 5, we proudly wore QR Code t-shirts! Thank you to all the people that asked for permission to scan my (100% of pure muscle) chest.

QR Code T-Shirts from interlinkONE

Business Cards

• We handed out our latest QR Code Business Cards.   On the front of the card, the QR Code presented our contact information. The back of the card had a QR Code that went directly to our corporate website.

QR Code Business Cards

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If you’d like to try to create your own QR Codes, and measure their success, you can do so easily at QReate & Track.