Across the federal government, agency IT leaders demand integrated approaches to technology to tackle their most pressing mission challenges. Govplace, a leading enterprise IT solutions provider exclusively to the public sector, turned to Bluetext to develop FedInnovation (www.fedinnovation.com), a destination designed to help government agency executives get the latest information on current technology challenges and solutions for big data, cloud, security, mobility and storage. Developed in conjunction with leading technology providers including Dell, Intel Security and VMWare, it includes exclusive content, videos, blogs, and real-time social feeds.

FedInnovation represents the concept of combining relevant, fresh content, complementary offerings, and financial resources to deliver an educational platform to drive awareness and leads for Govplace across its target market.

From this platform, Govplace will drive blog posts, webinars, and other marketing programs to ensure its target audience understands the value that it, working with the leading IT providers to the Federal Government, can deliver.

The development of platform is a continued focus for Bluetext as we look to conceptualize, design and develop creative solutions that deliver measurable business impact for our clients. We are finding that the customers of our clients are demanding unique experiences with premium content delivered in an easy to consume manner. That is the goal behind FedInnovation. Explore FedInnovation today (www.fedinnovation.com).

 

 

In an effort to rally its thousands of sales and customer facing teams at its Global Sales Conference in Dallas in April 2014, CSC turned to Bluetext to conceptualize and deliver a brand launch video and interactive experience around the key technology conversations that the company is focused on for the year ahead. The concepts of partnership and innovation, based on CSC’s decades of experience, came to life in an effort to position the company for the next wave of technology trends facing enterprises across the globe.


Bluetext built a storyboard concept around the “Road to Next-Gen IT”, and designed animated illustrations weaved throughout the video to most effectively tell the story. Now Bluetext is working on a virtual briefing center where CSC’s clients and entire ecosystem can come to learn more about these key technology conversations, set to launch in the next few months.

“Your focus, partnership and can-do attitude allowed us to deliver a complex world-class project in record time. Your ability to co-imagine and co-create with us is appreciated and valued greatly.”

Director of Global Brand & Digital Marketing
CSC

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At Bluetext, we help many companies and organizations tell their brand stories through a family of imagery that delivers the message, attitude, and tonality for which marketing leaders are hungering.   Our clients want a platform for their brand that they can own, because as many markets become commodotized, this kind of differentiation allows them to stand out and represent their brand’s value.

Here are some recent samples:

Leveraging CSC’s brand mark, Bluetext was able to create these representative solution areas.

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Gamescape produces eye-popping marketing retention programs leveraging gamification, social media, and a fire hose of sports data to deliver a completely brandable fun new experience for local and national bar and restaurant establishments across the country
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Iron Bow retained Bluetext to bring its solution areas to life in a fresh new and inviting way. Iron Bow wanted to be portrayed as approachable.

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Bluetext designed a series of illustrations consistent with a new brand attitude architecture. The four dimension illustration series was used throughout hundreds of assets for Sourcefire with both a white and black base design system, following research that the black and white option would be advantageous for Sourcefire marketing.

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VMWare retained Bluetext to bring its value proposition to life in a fresh new and inviting way.

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Bowman needed to convey their multi discipline multi vertical end to end solutions in a visually compelling way

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John Martin – Chief Operating Officer of the Washington Times talks about their new digital platform.  Designed by Bluetext.

Gamescape, the brainchild of two die-hard fantasy sports enthusiasts and marketing entrepreneurs, came to Bluetext with a clear mission: create a gamification experience leveraging daily fantasy sports that drives customer loyalty as a brandable solution for bars, restaurants and other venues nationwide.

Bluetext took this concept and, with the Gamescape team, and did every aspect of their branding, marketing, and platform design and development.

The first step was to develop a killer brand for Gamescape . Inspired by the gold coin patrons earn when making the correct fantasy sports selection while enjoying themselves at the venue.  Here is a preview of our internal logo progression.

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Bluetext started the interaction design process by performing a technical assessment of requirements gathering. We needed to create a sophisticated application that included a robust sports fantasy system , a messaging system for patrons to interact together, and profile creation with location-based geo-fencing. On top of all of that the new platform had to be visually striking, extremely intuitive and easy-to-use.

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From loyalty-building rewards points to new ways to communicate with your customers, GAMESCAPE offers an impressive suite of features focused on increasing the opportunities to interact and connect with your guests while offering them new entertainment options. GAMESCAPE’s geofencing technology requires players to be in your establishment in order to join a game.

 

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Bluetext is proud to announce its latest project launch for a new  venture co-founded by two leaders in their respective industries – The National Housing Trust and Novogradac & Company LLP.  Bluetext provided comprehensive digital strategy, design and development to bring this exciting venture from concept to reality.

PrezCat, an online catalogue of state and local affordable housing preservation policies launched in early 2014, allows affordable housing preservation developers, housing finance authorities, housing advocates, state and local decision makers and other stakeholder to easily search and query policies, data and programs that are most relevant to their short and long term needs. The catalogue will be useful for:

  • Housing Developers to triage their ability to refinance or meet a seller’s asking price while considering how to measure the likelihood of success in a given transaction.
  • Housing finance agencies to quickly compare their own tax credit Qualified Allocation Plan language to those listed in popularity order and based on our visitors’ clicks. of their peers.
  • Advocates to better measure both how their states are performing against the benchmarks set by their own Qualified allocation Plan and how that performance compares to states across the U.S. In response, those advocates can set the bar higher, year after year.

PrezCat is a joint effort between the National Housing Trust and Novogradac & Company LLP and generously funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

National Housing Trust is the only national nonprofit engaged in housing preservation through public policy advocacy, real estate development, and lending.

Novogradac & Company LLP is a highly respected national certified public accounting and consulting firm with deep expertise and extensive experience in the affordable housing, community development and renewable energy fields.

Sourcefire, one of the world’s leading security software enterprises, enlisted Bluetext to help it address numerous marketing and positioning challenges as it delivered a new generation of solutions in a crowded and competitive market. Our first task was to gather insights through a comprehensive global brand experience audit of how its brand is used and deployed, including a thorough market analysis. From that discovery process we were able to anticipate near- and long-term needs for the company. These insights allowed us to design a new corporate visual identity system and digital platform that would represent Sourcefire’s current and emerging brand.

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Challenge

The Sourcefire corporate marketing team faced a number of challenges and opportunities as it headed into its next phase of growth. Many of these, such as brand control and identity consistency, were simply the result of the brand’s successful growth and rapid expansion. Others were tied to ever-changing and advancing technologies, and the effect these were having on the evolution of the overall cyber security marketplace as well as the impact on end-user wants, needs and behaviors.

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Solutions

Bluetext’s first task was to conduct a comprehensive global audit of how the Sourcefire brand was being used and deployed, including the types of branding situations it faced in the market and its anticipated future needs. This analysis ultimately led to practical, real-world recommendations that would apply to the identity system we would develop.

Bluetext designed a series of illustrations consistent with a new brand attitude architecture we designed. The four dimension illustration series was used throughout hundreds of assets for Sourcefire with both a white base and black base design system, following research that the black and white option would be advantageous for Sourcefire marketing.

Finally, to complete the comprehensive new design system, Bluetext developed a comprehensive digital strategy spanning a responsive user experience design system, an enhanced Drupal content management system, partner and resource portals, and comprehensive brand identity guidelines building on the knowledge acquired from the brand audit. This tool set not only enables Sourcefire to effectively manage its brand consistently among internal stakeholders and external partners, but also serves as a touchstone, continually reminding all audiences of the brand’s strategic intent.

Results

Cisco acquired Sourcefire for $2.7 billion within one year of the completion of this engagement. By any measure, that would be considered a pretty good result.

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It certainly feels as if a traditional approach to media relations is on a downward slide to oblivion. With so many ways to connect directly with prospects, customers, and influencers, many companies are questioning the investment in old-school earned media. Even social media-based PR has become pervasive enough to feel ‘traditional’ to some degree. And with sponsored content, native advertising and pay-for-play by-lines gaining in popularity, it’s understandable that many marketers are becoming more deliberate in figuring out how to best structure a long-term public relations campaign. But as we like to tell our clients, while digital strategies are an essential part of the marketing mix, traditional media outreach is still important. Here are five common myths about public relations in the year 2014 that are worth examining:

 

1)      Traditional PR is becoming irrelevant. This is a very tempting myth to buy into because fewer publications are thriving; and because fewer reporters are employed by those publications, it calls into question readership and impact. We continue to see layoffs across the media landscape, and some trade pubs have closed their doors. Print readership is way down, but many of these publications have maintained or upped their commitment to digital content. All of this is not necessarily an indictment of earned media as much as it is the “printed form” of earned media, which we still feel provides tangible validation of a company’s products or services, and enables thought leaders to shape conversations. An independent analysis from a credible publication will always be taken more seriously than your own marketing. In addition, the search engines continue to value original “good” content from news outlets over sponsored articles.

 

2)     Sponsored content is just as good as earned media. It is true that target audiences are looking for good content, regardless of where it is published and by whom. Still, editors are struggling to incorporate sponsored content into their online publications. They know it’s a nice revenue stream, but they are still hesitant to do anything that might confuse their readers by making native advertising look too much like their own writing. As a result, it often is marked with their own version of a scarlet A—clearly denoting it as a paid placement.

 

3)     Get a good article placed, and everyone will see it. It wasn’t that long ago that a print publication would get passed around an office so that actual readership might be many times the circulation. Those days are long gone, and many trade pubs have shifted to online only. That means that the likelihood that an individual print article will be seen and viewed by the right audience is falling. Instead, today’s media currency is sharing through social channels as well as direct outreach. We tell our clients to aggressively market their earned media placements as much as possible, and every good PR program needs to have a solid social media strategy. That increases the chance that prospects see the article as you can’t just assume that the target audiences you want to see the content will stumble across it organically. In addition, the search engines and social media algorithms put a premium on those that get shared the most, guaranteeing that the article will come up high in search results and in social feeds.

 

4)     You can’t connect media coverage with leads and sales. Marketing and sales teams struggle to show a direct connection between media coverage and new sales leads. At Bluetext, we think that you can make that connection and show the value of media outreach, and that any smart PR program will have those types of metrics integrated into their campaigns based on tying media coverage to business objectives. There are effective methods to drive readers to landing pages and microsites, where re-targeting and other lead generation connections can be made and measured. The key is being smart about the tools you use and the results you are looking for.

 

5)     Traditional PR is slowly but surely going the way of the dinosaurs. This myth is probably closest to some version of reality, depending on how one defines ‘traditional.’  As I said earlier, print as a PR medium is declining, but there are still news sources for which media coverage can have impact. At the end of the day, good content is good content, no matter where it is published. Getting that good content to the right audiences means using all of the platforms—traditional and digital. No one can afford to put all of their eggs in one basket anymore. Campaigns must be integrated and coordinated for maximum impact.

With so much value and change coming out of organic Search Engine Optimization it is easy to make a mistake. We’ve made a presentation of the top 10 mistakes you should try to avoid when working on your SEO campaigns.

from Jason Siegel