About Me 0115: February 2011

Monday, February 21, 2011

1 internet marketing

When there are 300 other companies doing the same thing as yours in a market like New York City, how do you stand out? Primary Wave founder Gregg Hamerschlag owned a home health care company for many years. Gregg knew he wanted to build a brand, and one way he differentiated it was by getting the number “1-800 HOME CARE.” He got financing, did radio and print advertising, and built his brand around this number. The story doesn’t end there. Though it was a New York-based business, Hamerschlag found out he could license this number for use in other markets around the country. And that is where Primary Wave started.

Hamerschlag trademarked the number, and set it up for use in other areas. Calls are automatically routed to local businesses based on source of incoming number. Currently the HOME-CARE number is active in over 65% of United States. Other popular numbers that he’s working with include 877 WINDOWS and 800 HURT NOW.

Rob Nestico, Managing Partner at Kisling, Nestico & Redick LLC in Akron Ohio had started a limousine business before law school. The number “850-LIMO” let him grow that business, but when he and his partners launched their personal injury law firm, they couldn’t get a distinctive number. Their marketing firm suggested the 800-HURT-NOW number. Netstico was hesitant to take on a vanity number that he didn’t own and become dependent on it. He was wary of price increases and being held hostage unless he changed the entire branding of firm. When he contacted Primary Wave, Hamerschlag set up the deal with a 99-year lease, with a reasonable set of increases that allowed Nestico to move forward.

“If you’re not branding well and people see your billboard, they may drive by it too fast and they won’t know how to reach you,” said Hamerschlag. “If they go home to Google for personal injury lawyers they’ll see 20 competitors. Put “800 Hurt-Now” on a billboard and people will remember the number.”

Netstico’s business has grown from an initial 5-10 cases per month to 150-200 cases per month over the last six years. They get 15 inquiries a day via their use of the 800 number. The growth is reflected in the size of his firm, which is up from the original three partners to 12 lawyers, with 30 support staff and multiple locations around Ohio.

Nestico notes that success isn’t built into the phone number itself. “The number has to be used in cross marketing, in different aspects of marketing channels. We use billboards, direct mail, mobile ad trucks, yellow pages and more.”

Hamerschlag understands this. Primary Wave developed template TV commercials and partnerships with post card and billboard companies. Brand new licensees can access all this collateral that they can use in their market (for some extra money). There is also metrics tracking included in the licensing, so you know the number of calls, length of calls, and licensees can directly see the impact. On the Internet, people searching based on the number will find a directory which links them directly to the local firm in their area which is the number licensee.

Typical cost for a city market is between $150 and $1000 a month depending on the market and the number. Since numbers are costly, Primary Wave has also bought new ones on behalf of other firms and worked out deals for licensing in other parts of the country. Hamerschlag has this advice for start ups: “The most important thing besides raising money is to brand yourself in the right way.”

Primary wave is growing, and recently added Jim McCann of 1-800-Flowers.Com to their board of directors. How is your branding helping your company be memorable?

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Thursday, February 17, 2011

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Soon after, so did cellphones across Egypt, and then the Internet, as authorities cut communication in a last-ditch effort to halt the protests gripping the country.

The only trace the caller left was in cyberspace, where he had delivered a haunting message via Twitter: “Pray for #Egypt.”

Three days later in Washington, D.C., Nadine Wahab, an Egyptian émigré and media-relations professional, sat staring at her computer, hoping rumors of the caller’s disappearance weren’t true.

Suddenly his screen name flashed to life. She stared at the message.

“Admin 1 is missing,” it said. “This is Admin 2.”

Admin 1 was the caller, the anonymous administrator of a Facebook page that had played a crucial role in inspiring the uprising in Cairo. He had left Wahab with a contingency plan. If he disappeared, Wahab should wait until Feb. 8, two weeks from the date of the first protest, before she revealed his identity and sounded the alarm. At all costs, she was to maintain the appearance of normalcy on the page.

The contingency plan had made no mention of an Admin 2, and Wahab worried that the message might be a trap.

For the next week, Wahab and her small cadre of online associates became immersed in what seemed like a shadowy cyberthriller. At its center was a bespectacled techie named Wael Ghonim, a 30-year-old father of two, and Google’s head of marketing in the Middle East.

“My purpose,” wrote Wael Ghonim, “is to increase the bond between the people and the group through my unknown personality. This way we create an army of volunteers.”

Khaled Desouki / Getty Images

Months of online correspondence between Ghonim and Wahab, parts of which were provided to Newsweek, as well as telephone and online conversations with the magazine, reveal a man who adopted a dead man’s identity to push for democracy, taking on a secret life that nearly consumed him.

Ghonim had received a master’s degree in marketing and finance from American University in Cairo and began working for Google in late 2008. In little more than a year, he was promoted to head of marketing for the Middle East and North Africa, a position based in Dubai, where he and his family moved into a house in one of the city’s affluent suburbs.

• Niall Ferguson Blasts Obama’s Egypt Debacle

• Christopher Dickey: Hosni Mubarak’s Final Tragedy

• Peter Beinart: America’s Proud Egypt MomentGhonim and Wahab met electronically last spring, after Ghonim volunteered to run the Facebook fan page of Mohamed ElBaradei, the Egyptian Nobel Prize winner who had emerged as a key opposition leader; Wahab offered to help with PR. Ghonim had a strong tech background, having already founded several successful Web ventures. But it was his marketing skills that would fuel his transformation into Egypt’s most important cyberactivist.

Under Ghonim, ElBaradei’s page, which promoted democratic reform, grew rapidly. He surveyed its fans for input, pushing ideas like crowdsourced video Q&As. “Voting is the right way to represent people in a democratic way,” he wrote Wahab in May. “We use it even inside Google internally. Even when our CEO is live, if someone posts a tough question and others vote, he must answer it.”

Soon after, so did cellphones across Egypt, and then the Internet, as authorities cut communication in a last-ditch effort to halt the protests gripping the country.

The only trace the caller left was in cyberspace, where he had delivered a haunting message via Twitter: “Pray for #Egypt.”

Three days later in Washington, D.C., Nadine Wahab, an Egyptian émigré and media-relations professional, sat staring at her computer, hoping rumors of the caller’s disappearance weren’t true.

Suddenly his screen name flashed to life. She stared at the message.

“Admin 1 is missing,” it said. “This is Admin 2.”

The contingency plan had made no mention of an Admin 2, and Wahab worried that the message might be a trap.

“My purpose,” wrote Wael Ghonim, “is to increase the bond between the people and the group through my unknown personality. This way we create an army of volunteers.”

Khaled Desouki / Getty Images

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